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HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 
WILLIAM B. LIGHTON 




LIFE TOOK ON NEW SAVORS 



Happy Hollow 
Farm 

By 

William R. Lighton 

Author of ^'Letters oj an Old Farmer to His Son" 



Illustrated 



New York 
George H. Doran Company 



SS2\ 
.L41 



Copyright, 1914, 1915, 
BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY 

Copyright, 1915, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



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ILLUSTRATIONS 

Life Took on New Savors . . . Frontispiece 



Field 



9 



PAGE 



The Old Huntsville Road 22 ^ 

Here Our Life Began ^^ 

For the Christmas Fire '^'* 

Good for Generations to Come . . - 88 
Everything for the Table at Bare Cost of Pro- 
duction ^^^ 

Our First Crop ^^^ 

So We Bought a Set of Goats .... 146 

Increase 

There Was a New Glory upon Our Own Harvest 



216 



We Were Making Our Acres Do Their Utmost 238 
This Was Our Dream Come True . . • 272 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 



Suppose you had wanted some big thing 
with all your heart for all your life; and sup- 
pose you knew that your wife had always 
wanted just the same thing in just the same 
way. Suppose that in the fullness of time, 
when you were in the very prime of your years, 
with the joy of life at its strongest, this fond 
dream should become reality ; and suppose that 
after half a dozen years of actual experience 
you should find the reality better beyond com- 
pare than the dream ever dared be. Suppose 
all this, and how do you suppose you'd feel ? 

Well, that's the story of Happy Hollow 
Farm. 

Maybe I'd better say right at the beginning, 
and have it over with, that ours is different 
from the general run of back-to-the-land 



10 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

stories. There was no harsh or bitter fact in 
our lives that drove us to farming as a last 
hope. I hadn't lost my job in town. I wasn't 
facing a nervous breakdown after long years 
of faithful service of an inhuman employer. 
We hadn't been worn to desperation trying to 
make both ends meet. Nothing like that. The 
plain, unromantic facts were that no man could 
have desired a kinder, better tempered, more 
considerate boss than I had. I was my own 
boss. For a long time I'd been making a 
pretty fair-to-middling living for my family, 
writing stuff for the magazines. Income was 
growing better and better as the years passed. 
We were getting our full share of the enjoy- 
ment of books and music and the rest of life's 
refinements. We were seeing something of the 
world between whiles ; we were making friends 
worth having; we were steadily widening our 
circle and getting good out of every minute of 
it. Besides, we were getting ahead a little. As 
for the health part of it, there wasn't a doctor 
of our acquaintance whom I couldn't have 
worn to a wilted wreck in a day's cross-country 
hike or a long pull at the oars. 

I'm telling you this so frankly, not by way 
of bragging, but just to let you know that it 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 11 

wasn't a sense of failure or weakness or im- 
pending evil that set our minds toward our 
farm. We were faring uncommonly well. If 
we fussed a little now and then, wishing for 
something we hadn't, the fussing wasn't seri- 
ous. The long and short of it is that if carking 
care had sought a roost on our roof in those 
days she'd have been driven to startled flight 
by the sounds of jocund well-being that over- 
flowed the place. 

Yet with so much happiness we hadn't 
reached the supreme content, the sense of 
crowning completeness. It's not easy to make 
that feeling plain. To be happily satisfied 
with life's richness, and yet to be possessed by 
great desire — there's something of the idea. 
We had our vision, Laura and I, and it was al- 
ways with us. 

The vision was not of great possessions, nor 
of great fame and high place, nor of any other 
of the fair, false lures to disappointment. It 
was a vision of Home. So that you may un- 
derstand the rest of what I'm to write, I must 
try to make you see that vision as we saw it. 

Laura and I were married in 1890. From 
the first our ideals of home hadn't a hair's 
breadth of difference. You might say that our 



12 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

idea took form before we were born; for each 
of us came of a long line of home-makers. It 
was in our blood. We might differ about 
other things, but never about that. For both 
of us home was life's one great essential. It 
wasn't merely a pretty sentiment; it was a 
ruling passion. 

We were agreed in this, too: We would 
never compromise our vision; we would never 
let life offer us something "just as good" and 
accept it as the real thing. We should know a 
counterfeit when we saw it. We might have to 
accept postponement and maybe ultimate de- 
feat; but we'd go down with our colors nailed 
to the masthead. Talk about fixed ideas ! We 
certainly had one of 'em. 

Before ever we set pencil to paper with the 
first scrawled sketch, we had the picture in 
our minds. Wide spaces — that was the es- 
sence of it. It wouldn't answer at all that we 
should have just any sort of roof over our 
heads and then let the spirit of contentment 
do the rest. It wouldn't do at all that we 
should just ''take a house," live in it till we 
were tired, and then swap it for another, on 
the chance of by and by finding something 
that would suit us well enough. We didn't 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 13 

have to do any blind groping toward our re- 
ality. We knew from the very beginning what 
it must be. 

A beautiful setting, somewhere, with hills 
and woods and clear water and far vistas — 
that's what we must find. We had never seen 
that spot; but we had faith. It must exist. 
There our house would stand, nestled safe in 
the heart of soft delights. 

And such a house! For eighteen years it 
grew in our minds, taking form slowly, slowly. 
A wide-spreading roof of beautiful lines ; and 
beneath the roof wide, generous spaces. There 
must be nothing cramped. Our idea expressed 
itself in spaciousness, not in luxury. We must 
have lots of room. The living center of the 
whole thing would be a great, massive fireplace 
of stone, wide, deep-throated, fit to hold a 
roaring winter fire of huge logs of oak and 
hickory. Do you remember that Christmas 
scene in Pickwick Papers^ with the jovial old 
Wardle and his friends gathered about the 
blaze? In our first years together Laura and 
I read that story. After that, do you fancy 
you could have induced us to plan for steam 
radiators or a furnace in the basement? Right 
from that minute that fireplace was ours. 



14 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

Around this our thoughts grouped them- 
selves, opening out, broadening, room by room, 
space upon space, with nothing grudged and 
no mean subterfuges. We were to build, not 
for ourselves alone, but for generations. We 
dreamed of a home that, not in our lifetime 
alone, but through the generations to come 
after us, would slowly, slowly grow richer and 
richer in all life's sweetnesses and gentle mem- 
ories. We would build an abiding place for 
the spirit that endures. 

Most likely you can understand, without 
more telling, what we were driving at. Most 
of us, at one time or another, have nursed that 
fond notion. Laura and I clung to it as the 
first-born inspiration of our life together. Bit 
by bit we watched it grow. For years upon 
years we kept a portfolio of pictures and 
sketches and scraps; and now and then, when 
our life seemed to be halting a little, as if to 
catch its breath, we'd get these out and look 
them through and talk them over. That 
helped, no end. 

There was one thing we always carefully 
avoided in our talks — the perfectly plain im- 
possibility of actually doing this thing we were 
dreaming about, as matters stood with us. We 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 15 

lived at Omaha in those days. To make the 
barest beginning on that home of ours up there 
would have taken a small fortune. We had no 
fortune, and there was no chance of our ever 
getting one. Laura knew that as well as I 
did. I don't know why that didn't make us 
disgruntled or melancholy; but it didn't. 
Eighteen years is a long time to wait for the 
thing you want, as we wanted that home. 

It was worth waiting for. Fulfillment of 
great desire is always worth waiting for. We 
have found fulfillment of our desire. 

As I'm putting these words on paper, it's 
midnight. Excepting the lamp on my desk, 
lights are out in the house. Laura and the 
children went to bed an hour ago. It's early 
May, but the nights are still cool here. I 
built up a fire at sunset; a fire of oak and 
hickory logs banked against a big blackjack 
backlog. After supper we sat around the 
hearth, and I held little Peggy on my lap and 
read to her out of the Jungle Books until she 
grew drowsy. After that, Laura and I sat 
together for an hour or so, not talking much, 
but looking into the red flare and flicker of the 
flames, thinking. By and by she told me 



16 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

good-night, and I came over to my own room 
to write for a little while. 

The fire still burns, softly. From where I 
sit I can see it glowing in the deep stone fire- 
place down the length of the big living room, 
and watch the ruddy, warm shadows on the 
walls and the high arched ceiling. It's very 
beautiful. There's a brilliant full moon in 
mid-heaven. The living-room floor is check- 
ered with golden light falling through the 
small square panes of the long doors and win- 
dows. Looking out, I can see the long, soft, 
moonlit slope of the land toward the river, a 
half mile away; and beyond, the full rise of 
the spring-clothed, mist-crowned Ozark hills. 
It's very beautiful. One of my windows 
stands open, and on the slow air the odor of 
sweetbrier comes in. There's the smell of 
moist earth, too, and now and then a whiff of 
the pungent tang of wood smoke from some 
big brush fires that were set this afternoon. 
If I listen, I can hear the low chuckle of a 
brook a little way from the house. 

This is fulfillment. This is the home of our 
dreams come true, just as we saw it through 
those eighteen years of waiting. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 17 

How did it come about? Well, that's the 
story, of course. 

Maybe there's no better way to put it than 
just to say that our idea wouldn't wait any 
longer to be born. Ideas are a good bit like 
other living things ; when the birthtime comes, 
you can't put it off just because you think 
you're not ready. That's the way it seemed 
to work with us. 

It was in the early spring of 1908. Laura 
was away from home on a visit. While she 
was gone, one night I got out paper and pencil 
and set to work. Until that time we hadn't 
even tried to make a finished plan; we had 
only sketches and scraps, here a little and there 
a little, on vagrant sheets. I began putting 
them together. Before I went to sleep that 
night I had sent to Laura my completed drafts. 

They came back to me with only two words 
of comment: "Simply perfect!" That gave 
me plenty to think about until Laura got 
home. 

"Well," I said then, "if that house is all 
right, let's go find a place to put it, so we can 
be getting started on it." 

Laura laughed. I'd known that she would. 
She had always said that she was the "practi- 



18 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

cal" one. She isn't a bit more practical than 
I am, if you get right down to it; but never 
mind that now. The point is that she laughed. 
No doubt it did sound funny. 

"All right!" I said. "But we're going to 
build that house, just the way it lies there, be- 
fore the end of this year. We're going to 
spend next Christmas in that very identical 
house." 

"Why, old man!" Laura chided. She 
thought I was fooling. We had never got into 
the way of joking about that home of ours; 
we'd as soon have jested about an ailing child. 
By and by, when I kept on nagging, she knew 
she'd have to deal with me. 

"Why, how are we possibly going to do it?" 
she asked. That's the sort of question that 
some people call "practical." 

"I don't know," I said; "but we're going to 
start right off now and find out. We can't do 
it here ; that's true enough. It isn't a town-lot 
proposition. A suburban acre or two won't 
do. We must have lots of land. That home 
is going to need a big farm to go with it. It's 
going to be an old-fashioned homestead sort of 
thing. I guess we're agreed on that. Well, 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 19 

then, the thing to do is to go and hunt up our 
farm." 

That brought on more conversation. Laura 
didn't want to hurt ; but she had to say it sooner 
or later. "Have you forgotten that it takes 
money to buy a farm?" she asked. "You know 
how much money we have." 

I knew, well enough. By shaking out and 
cashing in all our resources we could have in 
hand in real money something less than four 
thousand dollars. I'll admit that that made 
me feel a bit uneasy. If it had been forty 
thousand I'd have felt better. Even forty 
thousand in Omaha wouldn't have let us "get 
by" with what we meant to do. 

"No matter," I said. "Just listen to this, 
now : We want that place, wherever it is. It's 
ridiculous to suppose that it doesn't exist 
somewhere, when we've wanted it so long and 
so faithfully. We've never really tried to find 
it. That's what we're going to do now." 

"But if we had a big farm, what should we 
do with it?" Laura persisted. "We're not 
farmers." It beats all how very practical a 
practical person can be if she puts her mind 
to it. 

I'm bound to own that Laura was right, on 



20 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

the face of things. Neither of us was even 
distantly related to a farmer, except by mar- 
riage. That part of it didn't strike me as 
hopeless, though. We were used to keeping a 
cow and a few hens ; our town-lot garden had 
always been the envy of the neighbors ; for the 
last five years I'd been tending an acre of 
small fruits with uncommon success. We had 
the knack of making things grow and thrive. 
As the Frenchman says, we had "the smell for 
the soil." Besides, for years upon years we 
had been tireless readers of the literature of 
modern farming; we knew a lot of the theory 
of it. No, that part didn't appear hopeless, 
not ,by a long shot. 

"Anyway," I said, "we can learn. That's 
not worrying me now. The point is to find the 
farm. We'll start so soon as you want to pack 
your suitcase." 

Do you believe that the great gods ever give 
us mortals a "hunch"? Maybe we might as 
well believe it. If we don't, then we have to 
believe in luck, which isn't a speck more scien- 
tific. 

Something or other, by whatever name you 
call it, led us straight to our dream-farm. I 
bought railway tickets to Fayetteville, Arkan- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 21 

sas. There wasn't any reason in it; ordinary 
human intelligence had nothing whatever to 
do with it. We didn't know a blessed thing 
about Arkansas ; indeed, we shared a very com- 
mon prejudice against her. You know how 
folks have always felt about Arkansas — that 
she's nothing but a dead spot on a live map. 
If we had tried to reason it out, we shouldn't 
have come to Fayetteville. But we didn't rea- 
son. A few daj^s before I'd happened to get 
hold of a "farms-for-sale" list sent out by a 
Fayetteville real estate man. We'd read thou- 
sands of such circulars. There was nothing se- 
ductive about this one; it was indifferently 
written and badly printed, as if with an eye 
single to cheapness. I'll never tell you why; 
but on that list I'd checked a farm. There was 
nothing alluring in the description: "120 
acres 2^^ mi. from town, part cleared, no im- 
provements, $2400. Part Cash." The rest of 
the circular let us know that Fayetteville was 
in the heart of the Ozark mountain country, 
and that here was the seat of the state univer- 
sity. That's all we had to go by. 

It was the middle of a March night when we 
got to Fayetteville and went to bed. We 
waked in the morning in a blaze of crystal and 



22 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

golden glory. I didn't know quite what to 
make of it. Did you ever have your senses lit- 
erally stunned by a flood of delights? It 
needed a little time to understand that this was 
the sunrise breaking in upon us. We stood 
together by the window, looking out. Before 
us lay a picture that just stubbornly won't be 
put into words. There were tree-arched roads 
and the white houses of the town. Beyond 
we could see the somber-toned buildings of the 
university. Below us, through a winding hol- 
low, ran a shining river; and then again be- 
yond, rolling miles on miles into the mist-sof- 
tened distance, spread the billowy hills of the 
Boston Range, flushed with spring. Over all, 
mellowing it, suffusing it, melting it into liquid 
beauty, was that wonderful flooding light. 
"The light that never was on sea or land" — 
do you remember that? That's what it made 
me think of. 

We walked the streets for an hour after 
breakfast, not saying much, but looking, look- 
ing. Wherever we looked, through every open 
space, there lay our hills, misty blue and misty 
green and misty gold — wonderful, wonderful ! 
We loved them. I think we both felt, right 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 23 

from that first hour, that we had come to the 
end of our rainbow. 

"Well," I said, after a while, "we might as 
well go and have a look at the farm." There 
was only one farm in our minds. Think what 
you will, say what you like about it, the thing 
was already settled. We hunted up our real 
estate man, told him what we wanted, and 
showed him our checked copy of his list. "We 
want a place quite in the rough," I explained; 
"one that we may improve for ourselves. You 
understand." 

He took a good look at us, to make sure that 
he understood. No doubt he had us sized up 
about right, as a couple of crazy enthusiasts. 
He didn't try to argue us out of our notion. 
"Yes," he said, "I guess maybe that place 
might suit you, if you really want one in the 
rough." Without more talk we drove out of 
town. 

It was an old, old road we traveled; the 
Huntsville Road, it's called. Settlement of 
this Ozark country began a full century ago, 
in a day when rude trails were the only trav- 
eled ways. The Huntsville Road survived 
from the old times. It showed its age. Gray, 
tottering stone walls and gray, rotting rail 



24 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

fences meandered on either side, grown over 
with wild blackberries and thorny smilax and 
sassafras bushes. Here and there a huge elm 
bent over, its buds just breaking into frothy 
green. The rare farms along the road wore a 
shaggy, unkempt look. The road itself was 
rough — oh, yes, quite rough! Up hill and 
down it wandered, rain-rutted, twisting back 
and forth in quest of a smooth place it seemed 
never to find. We bumped quite a lot as we 
rode ; if the driver tried to dodge a stone in the 
wheel-tracks, he was sure to drop into a **chug- 
hole." 

"They'll be working these roads when spring 
opens up a little more," our real estate man 
said. He needn't have bothered to say any- 
thing about it. We weren't really minding 
the bumps ; for ahead of us, with a fresh reve- 
lation at each new turn of the way, opened the 
White River Valley, rimmed with the hills. 
We gazed and gazed, and couldn't get enough 
of gazing. 

By and by, turning off through a narrow, 
stony lane, we came to a rude wire gate in a 
crumbling rail fence. Just inside the gate the 
carriage halted. 

"This is the place," our real estater said ; and 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 25 

then, like a wise man, he sat waiting. I think 
he had his doubts. We found out afterward 
that this farm of ours had been for years a 
standing joke to the real estate folk of Fay- 
etteville. Nobody wanted it — its owner least 
of all. That's how it happened to be waiting 
for us. We had no doubts. That farm was 
ours! 

What we saw was a rough, untidy expanse, 
a half mile across, stretching from point to 
point of a deep crescent of low wooded hills 
that opened toward the south. Here and there, 
at broken intervals, lay a tiny irregular patch 
of ground under plow; and in between these 
were deep, tangled thiclvets of wild growtjis, 
dense as a jungle. In the depths of this wil- 
derness, somewhere near us, we could hear a 
brook making sport in a stony bed. Along 
the banks towered giant sycamores and feath- 
ery-limbed elms and stately walnuts. Count- 
less plumed heads of dogwood bloom were 
thrust out of the greenery, and we caught the 
odor of hawthorn and honey locust. 

"Come!" Laura said; and we got out of the 
carriage and walked down into the heart of 
the wild hollow, pushing the tangle aside that 
we might get close to the water's edge. The 



26 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

brook ran clear and free and cold. A little 
way up the bank we found a deep flowing 
spring, walled in in some old day, and brim- 
ming full. The ground was smothered in a 
very riot of spring bloom. Away up in the 
very tip-top of a sycamore, straight over our 
heads, a mocking-bird began singing, fit to split 
his little throat. I looked at Laura, and Laura 
looked at me; a smile passed between us — 
and it was all over! 

Oh, I know what you're thinking: "That's 
no way to buy a farm." Well, don't I know it? 
But this wasn't a farm. It had been a farm 
once, long ago, and it would be a farm again 
by and by; but just then it was simply acres 
and acres of raw, untamed beauty, inviting us. 

We walked around a little. The place lay 
in the form of an L — eighty acres across the 
south front, with forty acres of woodland on a 
hill at the back. There were three brooks wan- 
dering through the land. We stood at the 
edge of the woods and let our eyes follow their 
courses. Wherever we looked. Possibility was 
written large. 

"There's wood enough right here," I said, 
"to run our big fireplace for a thousand years !" 

The agent's circular had spoken solemn truth 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 27 

in saying that the place had no improvements. 
Nobody would have thought of giving that 
name to the weather-beaten old log house 
standing on the hill-slope, sheltering the tenant 
farmer and his family. The walls were mud- 
chinked, the doors hung awry, the broken win- 
dows were patched with paper and stuffed with 
faded rags. The house-yard was an ugly litter 
of refuse of unnumbered years of shiftless liv- 
ing. Near by was a tumble-down stable of 
thatched poles. Down below, by the big 
spring, stood a log-walled granary — without 
any grain in it. No, there weren't any im- 
provements. 

The tenant, a lean, listless man of the hills, 
came up and joined us presently. 

"You-uns thinkin' of buyin' thish-yere 
farm?" he wanted to know. "It ain't worth 
nothin'. It's a turrible sorry farm. You-all 
could starve plumb to death on thish-yere 

farm." 

Even the real-estater showed signs of emo- 
tion when we told him we were ready to talk 
turkey. The price was twenty dollars an acre ; 
we might pay one-fourth down and have any 
time we liked for paying the rest. We didn't 
try to dicker. If we had but known it we 



28 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

might have shaved several hundred dollars 
from that price by holding out and whip-saw- 
ing a while. We found that out afterward. 
If the agent had but known it, he might have 
doubled the price on us and we shouldn't have 
turned a hair. So maybe we're even. We cer- 
tainly wanted that place — and we certainly 
got it. The trade was closed that afternoon. 

"Well, we've bought something," I said to 
Laura when we were back at the hotel, slicking 
up a little for supper. To tell the truth, I was 
just the least trifle dismayed, now that it was 
all over and the tension relaxed and I could 
think deliberately of what we had done. I 
think Laura had something of that feeling, 
too. 

"Yes, old man," she said. It seemed to me 
that her tone lacked gayety ; but maybe I was 
wrong about that. 

"Isn't it beautiful?" I went on. 

"Perfectly beautiful !" she said. There was 
the ring of enthusiasm this time. "But did 
you hear what that tenant said? He said we 
could starve to death on that farm." 

"Oh, well!" I joked. "We could starve to 
death anywhere, if we wanted to." 

There was a silence. The silence drew out 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 29 

and out. When I stole a glance at her she was 
standing at the window, looking away across 
the hills, touching her lips with a finger-tip — 
a little trick she has when she*s thoughtful. 
She has never told me what she was thinking 
about, all to herself, in that minute. I've won- 
dered. When she turned from the window 
presently she was quite herself, smiling, game 
for anything. 

"Could you see where the house is to stand?" 
I asked. 

"Yes!" she flashed. "On that little knoll at 
the edge of the oats field, by that big wild 
cherry tree." 

"That's the place!" I said. We stood to- 
gether then and watched the sunset color fad- 
ing; watched till there was nothing to see but 
the dull flush of the afterglow. "Come!" I 
said then. "We must get supper and be ready 
for the train home." 

"Home!" Laura said. "Why, this is 
Home!" 

I've told you some rather intimate things; 
for I've wanted you to know the state of mind 
we were in when we began our life of farming. 
We weren't driven to it, you see ; we didn't go 



30 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

at it in fear and trembling, as a last hard re- 
sort. We went at it with fine, strong zest, as 
to our life's crowning adventure. I think that 
promised pretty well for happiness. 



II 



Our farm was bought m March of 1908. 
Six weeks later, in early May, we had cut loose 
from our old life and had come to Arkansas 
to begin the new. 

Nothing would satisfy us but to go at once 
to the farm. Thinking back, I have to laugh 
at our impetuous temper. There wasn't a 
building on the place fit to live in ; besides, the 
tenant's kase covered that year, to the end of 
the cropping season. We had no rights at all 
upon the land, save by sufferance, until the 
new year's crop would be gathered. There 
was some satisfaction, though, in thinking that 
this tenant was our tenant now. We had ac- 
quired him with the farm. He was farming 
"on shares," and was to give one half of what- 
ever he harvested, by way of rental. We dis- 
covered after a time that this share of the crop 
had almost enabled the former owner to keep 
the taxes paid. 

No matter about that. We had a tenant; 

31 



32 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

and he would be in possession of the farm, 
under a perfectly good contract, for the next 
seven or eight months. We had to negotiate 
with him for the privilege of coming upon the 
land to live in the meantime. 

We discovered at once that we weren't go- 
ing to be riotously fond of this tenant. He 
was very fussy, very jealous of those rights of 
his. He grudged the permission he gave us to 
pitch camp in the thicket down between the 
empty granary and the big spring. That was 
the only available spot, and we took it. It 
really suited us first-rate. 

We got into town in the early morning of 
that May day. By noon we had secured a big 
tent and had bought camp tools and suppHes 
— laundry soap, and rope, and salt, and 
matches, and an ax, and some canned toma- 
toes, and a bottle of witch-hazel, and coffee, 
and oilcloth, and flour, and a couple of water 
buckets, and baking powder — a wagon-load of 
truck. Right after dinner we went out with 
this stuff. By the middle of the afternoon we 
had the tent set up and our beds laid out for 
night. I brought wood and water then, and at 
sunset we had our supper, holding our plates 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 33 

in our laps, sitting on the ground around an 
open campfire. 

There were six of us: Laura, and my 
mother, and Dorothy, our daughter of fifteen, 
and Louis, who was twelve, and little Peggy, 
not yet three, and I, coming forty-two in the 
summer. Oh, yes, and there was Lee. I wish 
you might have known Lee. I don't know 
how old he was ; but he was a pronounced bru- 
nette with a trick of showing the whites of his 
eyes and his shining white teeth when anything 
tickled him. Something was always tickling 
him. We'd found him in Kansas and had 
brought him with us to Arkansas. Truly, he 
was a jolly soul. He's doing a life sentence in 
the Kansas penitentiary now, poor chap. I'll 
tell you more about Lee as we go along. It 
turned out that he was just no good at all for 
work; but while he lasted he was the Br'er 
Bones of our enterprise. 

While I live I shan't forget that first night 
at Happy Hollow. We dawdled over supper, 
talking and laughing, making happy jests at 
our own madness. Then the dusk came on, 
and slowly the darkness settled about us and 
shut us in. Somehow that darkness subdued 
our merriment, quieted us, set us to listening. 



34 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

Queer, eerie sounds were pulsing through the 
thickets. There was an intermittent flicker of 
fireflies, back and forth. Whippoorwills were 
calling in the gloom, and from back in the hills 
came the tremolo note of a little owl. There 
had been a breeze at sunset, but it had fallen 
away to a soft sighing. It was all mighty dif- 
ferent from the sort of evening song a town 
sings. There was no faintest murmur of the 
sound of human life; the only voice we heard 
was the voice of the wilderness. It wasn't un- 
friendly, but it was strange. I wondered wJiat 
Laura was thinking of it — but I didn't want 
to ask. 

Little Peggy dropped asleep in my arms 
and I put her to bed in the tent. After that 
we got to talking of to-morrow's plans and of 
what we would do first in the morning ; but the 
talk lagged lamely and petered out. To be 
perfectly frank, for just a minute or two I was 
bothered. Had our plunge been too headlong? 
Life, particularly for the women, gets a good 
deal of its meaning from familiar things and 
intimate contacts and established relations. 
The friendships and loves of years are more 
than habit, particularly with the women. For 
a minute or two I pondered whether we had 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 35 

done well. With the unfamiliar night about 
us, Omaha seemed just then very far away. I 
threw an armful of dry wood on the fire, to 
make it blaze up more cheerfully. 

We heard the voices of people coming up 
the lane. They went through our camp pres- 
ently, staring with curious interest — three sol- 
emn-faced hill folk, each with a gun hanging 
in the crook of his elbow. They didn't stop, 
but passed with a drawled "Ha-owdy!" The 
inflection can't be set upon paper. They went 
up to our tenant's house on the hill ; and after 
a half hour or so they returned — not through 
the camp this time, but through the thicket on 
the far side of the hollow. When they were 
across from us a voice called: 

"You-uns git that nigger out of hyar! Git 
him out to-morry, too, or he'll git killed!" 

Wouldn't that have dashed you? Lee was 
rolled in a blanket, lying on the grass beyond 
the fire. 

"Did you hear that, Lee?" I asked. 

Lee chuckled. He was certainly a master 
hand at finding things to chuckle about. "If 
a nigger got killed," he said, "every time a pore 
white trash talks biggity, this worl' would be a 



36 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

bad ba-ad place. It sho' would!" He chuck- 
led himself to sleep over that. 

We never heard anything from our first- 
night visitors. They never tried to pester our 
brunette. Maybe it's just as well they didn't. 
There's a sort of grim irony in the fact that 
Lee is "doing time" now for murder. Those 
night prowlers were merely making a little 
cheap noise; but that was our first taste of 
neighborliness in the new home. We didn't 
exactly like the flavor. 

Morning came in a burst of brilliance, dewy- 
fresh, wonderful. You know how such morn- 
ings affect you; they make you forget how 
queerly your mind behaved in the night. 
When we talk about the Resurrection Morn- 
ing, maybe it's a lot more than a figure of 
speech. The curl of blue wood-smoke from 
our breakfast fire rose unafraid in the sun- 
light ; the birds that flitted and fluttered about 
sang a tune that was mighty diff'erent from the 
melancholy whimpering of the whippoorwill 
and the owl. We laughed and felt good. 

After breakfast, Laura and I walked around 
here and there, stopping to loaf now and then, 
and talking. After all, though it chafed us 
sometimes like the mischief, it was a good thing 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 37 

for us that the place was in the hands of the 
tenant that summer. That gave us time for 
getting acquainted with our land and letting 
the acquaintance ripen. Our eagerness would 
have led us into some follies, if we'd had a free 
hand. Some of those follies would have been 
expensive; and if we had tried cropping our- 
selves, knowing as little as we did of conditions 
and methods, we must have ended our first 
year with something of disappointment on the 
practical side of things. Since that time hun- 
dreds of back-to-the-landers, seeing our later 
success, have asked us for advice that might 
help them along in ventures of their own. 
When we advise, we rather insist upon one 
point. I may as well give it to you here : 

If you've had no experience in running a 
farm, take your time through your first year. 
Don't plunge with your eyes shut. You'd bet- 
ter find a man to work with you. He needn't 
be a first-class farmer, though of course it's 
all the better if he's that; but he ought to be 
strong-backed, willing, tolerably good-tem- 
pered, and familiar with local conditions. 
Even if he isn't a genius, he'll teach you a lot 
of little tricks and handy ways. He'll* know 
something about your neighbors, too; and 



as HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

when they come at you — as some of them 
surely will — trying to make a horse-trade with 
you, or sell you a second-hand wagon or some 
other piece of junk, your man will most likely 
be able to speak a quiet word in your ear that 
will save you no end of disgust with yourself. 
Besides, there'll be lots and lots of times when 
you'll be mighty glad to have a man around to 
talk to, a man who speaks in the vernacular of 
the farm. The chances are that, even with 
good luck, you won't get very far with actual 
farming in your first year. You'll really need 
that time for doing as we did — getting over 
your feeling of strangeness and making delib- 
erate plans. 

Laura and I sat upon the topmost rail of an 
old worm fence that morning for an hour or so 
and watched our tenant at his work. He was 
in his cornfield. Corn had been planted two 
or three weeks ago. We could see the pale 
green lines of the young seedlings zigzagging 
across the field. The crop was getting its first 
cultivation this morning. The man had no 
cultivator; he was working with a plow. A 
dinky little plow, it was, built pretty much on 
the lines of those you see in pictures of farm- 
ing in the Holy Land or in barbarous Mexico. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 39 

I never could find out what a plow like that 
was supposed to do. It wasn't doing much of 
anything just then — merely bobbing and jerk- 
ing and bumping along over the stones. One 
lean mule was pulling it, and the plowman 
clumped and stumbled in the rear, yanking on 
the lines and swearing in a hurt, despairing 
sort of way. The plow-point would strike a 
bowlder buried just under the surface, go slid- 
ing and scraping over, then ram beneath an- 
other stone and stick there, pitching the han- 
dles into the air. Nine times in ten, when that 
happened, the handles would poke the plow- 
man viciously in his short ribs. That seemed 
to make him very angry. How that does hurt ! 
That's what he was swearing about; but his 
swearing sounded pitifully impotent, as if he 
was all out of breath. 

"Oh foot!" he'd gasp at the mule in an ex- 
asperated treble. "You old fool you!" Then 
he'd yank at the lines, pull his plow-point from 
beneath the stone, and go jolting and bobbing 
and bumping along till he hit the next one. It 
was a continuous performance. 

He'd used poor, cheap seed in planting his 
field, dropping it all by hand and covering it 
with a hand hoe. He'd got a very poor 



40 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

"stand." On the other side of the field his 
wife and three or four kids were replanting 
the vacant spaces — chopping little holes with 
heavy hoes, dropping a few grains in each hole, 
and chopping the earth back over them. It 
was very primitive, terribly laborious. Across 
the width of the field we could hear the chnk 
and rasp of the hoes against the stones at every 
slow, painful stroke. It wasn't much like the 
farming we'd been used to watching up in the 
prairie country. It appeared as if time had 
turned back a hundred years under our eyes. 

When we had looked on a while, Laura gave 
a little exclamation. "Can that land ever be 
really farmed?" she said. 

I laughed. I've found out that there's noth- 
ing better than a laugh for disguising dismay. 
"Oh, yes!" I said. "We'll have to get some 
of that stone picked up first. We'll need the 
stone, anjrway, when it comes to building." 

You'll notice that I've mentioned stone sev- 
eral times. That ground was certainly stony. 
Exceedingly stony — pile up the adverbs to suit 
yourself; you can hardly overdo it. On some 
of the field the soil showed through the stones 
only in spots. Truly, it was a tough-looking 
piece of ground. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 41 

After a year or two we discovered that it 
wasn't nearly so bad as it looked. You ought 
to see that same field to-day, with the straight, 
smooth lines of the young corn ribboning 
across it. I'm not joking. If you wanted a 
stone to throw at a marauding pig or a stray 
pup, you'd have to hunt around. But there's 
no use talking; that cornfield did look rocky 
on that first morning. 

When we got down to it, the cause of the 
trouble wasn't hard to find. The farm had 
been homesteaded in 1847, and since that time 
it had led a life of vicissitudes. That's a tough 
old word — vicissitudes; but it's no tougher 
than the facts. Once in its history, and only 
once, it had been a pretty well-kept farm ; but 
that was fifty years ago. Since that time it 
had suffered absolute neglect, or worse. Yes, 
there is something worse than downright neg- 
lect. The farming of tenants like ours is a 
sight worse. This farm had known years and 
years of such mishandling with crude tools and 
still cruder understanding. 

That surface stone was an accumulation of 
half a century. Year by year, little by little 
it had been turned up from the subsoil. The 
rains of year after year had washed the loose 



42 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

soil from around it, leaving it bare. Once in 
a while, when the bowlders absolutely blocked 
plowing, the largest of them would be thrown 
up into piles at ragged intervals through the 
field ; and there the piles would lie. After that 
the plowman would work around them; and 
gradually a tangle of wild growths would con- 
vert them into ragged, unsightly mounds. Be- 
tween the mounds the shallow scratching of 
the plow over the uneven surface left a multi- 
tude of little runways for the waters of oc- 
casional flooding rains — and there were the 
three brook-channels, waiting to bear away the 
tons upon tons of earth that every torrent 
washed down to them. I hate to think of the 
wealth of good soil that's been washed off these 
fields and lost in the course of fifty years. 
Since we began picking up the stone and using 
it to build walls for saving the washed soil — 
but let me get to that after a while, when the 
time comes. I'm crowding things. 

Besides the vast litter of stone, the field held 
a ragged army of huge stumps — walnut and 
oak. They were so big and so burly that in 
half a hundred years they had only half rotted 
out. Sitting on the fence that morning, we 
counted forty or fifty of them standing around. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 43 

With their spreading roots, every one of them 
took up at least a hundred square feet of 
ground — enough ground in the total to sup- 
port four hundred hills of corn. There isn't 
one of those stumps left to-day; we got rid of 
the last of them two years ago, with dynamite. 
Our tenant that year harvested his oats in part 
with an old-fashioned hand "cradle," and in 
part with a fussy little sickle. Stones and 
stumps forbade the use of any modern imple- 
ment. We're harvesting our grain on that 
very same land with sure-enough farm imple- 
ments. Working between whiles, in idle times, 
it has cost us about five dollars an acre to bring 
that land from the old state to the new; and 
that cost has been paid back to us, many times 
over, in increased crop yields. 

I've halted my story to tell you this, because 
this seemed to be as good a place as any for 
saying it. On that May morning six years 
ago, as we perched on the fence and watched 
the circus our tenant was making for us, it 
needed cheerful optimism and something of 
clear vision to look across the time to come and 
see a real farm where all that ugly disorder 
lay. Laura is one of these natural-born op- 
timists. Do you know how to recognize one 



44 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

of them? Let me tell you: When they face 
an apparently hopeless state of facts, they 
don't put on an air of forced resignation and 
begin to talk in pretty platitudes about keep- 
ing up a good heart and trusting in Provi- 
dence. None of that. They start to humming 
a saucy tune and begin to talk about something 
else. 

Laura hummed a bar or two of "Rock-a-bye, 
Baby," and slipped down from her seat. 
*'Come on," she said, "let's go and have a look 
at the place where the house will stand." 

If you want to know it, that spot was a hard 
looker. In the old days, long ago, this had 
been the site of a big, comfortable farmhouse. 
Later, as we got into our work of cleaning up, 
we came upon broken heaps of brick and stone 
from the ruined walls and chimneys ; but there 
was nothing of that showing at a hasty glance. 
For a long, long time this had been a waste 
place. It was littered with the inevitable stone 
piles, grown up in a wilderness so dense that a 
cottontail could hardly have worried through 
it. Do you remember the Kipling story of 
"Letting in the Jungle"? That's what had 
happened on this hillock. Wild growths in- 
numerable — blackberry canes and hawthorn, 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 45 

oak and elm and hickory scrub, wild plum bush 
and buck-brush, grapevines and thorny smilax 
— seemed to have worked themselves into a 
frenzy trying to smother out and hide every 
vestige and token of the home that had once 
been. To-day we have that spot looking like 
a park; but it certainly did look hke Billy-be- 
Blowed that morning. 

"Let's see," I said: "The house measures 
seventy-two feet across the south front. We'd 
better mark the southeast corner first, where 
your room will be." 

Very gravely Laura stooped, groping in the 
matted growth. She found three smooth, flat 
stones and laid them up, one upon the other, 
as a monument. By and by, when we built 
the house, we put the southeast comer exactly 
there. 

"Now," I said, "that's all right. Now let's 
see if I can sort of run the lines for the rest 
of it." 

Scrambling over stone-heaps, thrusting the 
brush aside, crushing a way through, I worked 
across to the western side, measuring it by 
paces as well as I was able. Standing at the 
extreme ends, we could barely see each other 
through the tangle. I was out of breath; my 



46 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

hands and face were scratched and bleeding. 
I worried my way back to Laura's side. 

"It's going to be a fine, large house!" I said. 
"I swear, I didn't know that seventy-two feet 
could take you so far from anywhere." 

She laughed and began to help me pick the 
thorns out of my hands. "And it's sixty-six 
feet from front to back," she reminded me. 
"Do you know what we're going to build our 
fine, large house of?" 

"Why, yes," I said. "We've talked that all 
over, haven't we? Heavy stone foundations 
and stone chimneys, and heavy log walls. I 
haven't changed my mind about that; have 
you?" 

"Can you tell how much material it's going 
to take?" she asked. 

"Why, no," I said. "Not exactly. Pretty 
soon, when we have time, we'll get somebody 
to sit down with us and sort of figure it out. 
Anyway, there ought to be stone enough right 
here; and there ought to be logs enough up 
there on the woods forty." 

"We'll need a few boards, too, besides the 
logs," Laura said. "And the house ought to 
be shingled. And we'll need a barn, and some 
chicken houses, and a well, and some fencing, 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 47 

and a few odds and ends like that. Have you 
any idea what it's going to cost?" 

She wasn't talking like that just to show a 
mean disposition. Practical people have to 
talk so, every once in a while, to keep from 
seeming too much like other people. 

I hadn't the least notion as to what it might 
cost. "Never niind," I said. "We'll start to 
figuring around on that, so soon as we get set- 
tled." 

There the proposition stood for three 
months. I don't mean to say that we didn't 
do some thinking in that time. We thought 
and schemed and planned, and gathered data, 
and discussed ways and means every day and 
every hour ; but at the end of the three months 
we were apparently not a step nearer to a final 
settlement of the matter than on the day we 
took possession of the place. What do you 
think about that ? If you happen to be a cau- 
tious, conservative business man, instead of one 
who has spent most of his life writing fiction 
and making things come out right on paper 
for the people in his stories, I dare say it strikes 
you as utterly ridiculous. But if you were on 
the place to-day and could see how it has 
worked out, just exactly according to that 



48 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

first fond vision, you might take a notion to 
do your pooh-poohing under your breath. 

If home is no great shakes without a mother, 
neither is a farm without a cow. Our tenant 
had no cow. He argued that a cow would be 
a needless extravagance; for he and his folks 
ate sorghum molasses on their bread, and they 
drank creek water instead of coffee. But we'd 
grown used to keeping a cow, and we wanted 
a cow now. We argued with the tenant that 
every farm ought to have a cow on it for dec- 
orative effect, even if the farmer didn't use 
milk or cream or butter. He gave his consent 
that we might keep one, if we'd keep her tied 
up somewhere along the creek-bottom and not 
let her muss up his crops. So that afternoon 
we went over to a neighboring farm and 
bought a cow. 

We gave thirty-five dollars for her, and she 
was a good one for sure — we knew enough 
about cows to be able to make sure of that. 
She was a black Jersey, three years old, eligible 
to registry, gentle as a plump kitten. After I 
got her home, I spent the rest of the afternoon 
with an ax, clearing out the undergrowth 
along the creek, to make a place for pasturing 
her on a tether. Bluegrass and clover stood 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 49 

knee-deep on that low ground; it hadn't been 
pastured at all before our coming. Within 
twenty-four hours of the time we pitched our 
tent we had something started — an animal 
converting waste into something of value. It 
didn't strike us in just that way then; we 
hadn't thought so far ahead; but there, in min- 
iature, was the whole scheme of our later work 
in farming. What we thought about then was 
just the solid satisfaction of having a gallon 
of yellow milk to drink for supper, with a 
couple of gallons more set away in the spring, 
making cream for breakfast. We would have 
chickens, too, in a day or so; we had shipped 
our flock from the old home. And so soon as 
we could find a little space for it somewhere 
we meant to start a bit of garden, just to keep 
our hands in. 

It rained that night. When it rains in the 
Ozark country in the springtime, it rains. 
There was no stormy wind, no uproar, but only 
a steady, sluicing downpour that set our little 
corner all afloat in no time. The tent wasn't 
proof against it; it spattered through upon us 
in a thick, fine mist, drenching us. We tried 
making canopies of the bedclothes, sitting up 
in bed and holding them over our heads ; but 



50 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

that didn't work at all. Everything was 
wringing wet. In the middle of the night we 
turned out and ran for the empty granary. 
That shelter was just a degree or two better 
than none. The chinking was gone from the 
rough log walls, and the roof was shingled with 
homemade oak "shakes," now pretty well 
rotted away. The place wasn't dry, not by a 
long chalk. We sat on bundles of old corn 
fodder laid upon the floor where the leaks were 
least, drew our knees up under our chins and 
held umbrellas over us. It wasn't the least bit 
like living in town. If we had only thought 
so, we'd have been very uncomfortable ; but it 
didn't seem to occur to us. In her corner I 
heard Laura making jokes with little Peggy. 
They were laughing together and "making 
believe" under their umbrella. Pretty soon 
Laura began to quote verse: ". . . and the 
cares that infest the day shall fold their tents 
. . ." Then Mother told us some stories of 
the days of her girlhood in the Cumberland 
hills of Pennsylvania — tales of real hardship 
bravely borne, in a time when that country, too, 
was half wild. There was no going to sleep 
any more that night. 

It didn't matter. We didn't want to go to 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 51 

sleep, anyway. We were feeling pretty rol- 
licky. It isn't all of life to be under a water- 
tight roof. If you happen to have the slant of 
mind that lets you take things as they come, 
just as if you believed they were meant to be 
that way, you can have a lot of fun that other 
folks miss. 



Ill 



You mustn't get it into your mind that our 
intentions weren't serious as to actual practical 
farming at Happy Hollow. There are spots 
in what I've written that might lead you to 
mistake us for a happy-go-lucky pair of ama- 
teurs, interested mainly in doing some artistic 
tricks on our land, but not deeply concerned 
over the matter of turning the land into a suc- 
cessful, profit-making farm. I haven't been 
dwelling much upon that part of the proposi- 
tion. 

Our first desire was to make our ideal home 
at Happy Hollow; but we were bent also upon 
making a real farm. To put it bluntly, we had 
to make our acres do something for us, in a 
substantial way, or we couldn't afford to keep 
them for very long. Running a farm that 
doesn't pay, just for the fun of it, is pretty 
expensive sport. If there's a balance on the 
right side at the year's end, though it's only a 
little, the farmer may hang on hopefully; but 

52 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 53 

if he has to rustle to make up a deficit every 
year, though it's only a small one, he's on the 
anxious seat. Running a farm is exactly hke 
any other business in that particular : Once it 
has started downhill and has begun to eat up 
more than it produces, it's time to consider. A 
badly managed farm can produce a deficit with 
greater ease than the average farmer himself 
seems to understand. 

We weren't going at our farming indifferent 
to the outcome. Neither did we intend to trust 
to luck. We meant to make farming pay if 
we could, for we needed the money; and we 
knew well enough that to get the result we 
wanted we should have to practice good farm- 
ing. To get results that would appear to us 
satisfactory, we should have to beat the aver- 
age farmer. 

We had taken the precaution to study a 
soil-survey map of the Fayetteville section. 
The map showed that our land was naturally 
of a good type — not of the highest fertility, 
but a good sandy loam with a strong red clay 
subsoil. The abuses of bad farming had put 
it in a condition that would make it hard to 
handle for a while, until it might be smoothed 
out; but abuse could not altogether destroy 



54 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

its usefulness. After the fashion of tenant 
farmers everywhere, the tenants on this place, 
in addition to slovenly methods, had exhausted 
the natural supply of decaying vegetable mat- 
ter in the upper soil, so that the surface would 
bake and "crust" badly after rains. Besides, 
this humus is, as even the kindergartens teach 
nowadays, quite necessary to plant growth. 

There are many ways of getting humus into 
a depleted soil; but they all simmer down to 
one easy rule: You must put it there. It's 
like the kids' saying: "What goes up must 
come down." If you waste humus by allowing 
your soil to wash, by burning refuse instead of 
plowing it under, or by persistent cropping, 
and do nothing to renew the supply, the time 
is bound to come when you won't have any 
humus. That's just a little more obvious than 
the well advertised fact that two and two make 
four. That's practically the sum and sub- 
stance of the "worn out farm" bugaboo, north 
or south, east or west. This isn't the place for 
an argument about the theory of it. 

It would be hard to find a "worn out farm" 
anywhere that couldn't be made as good or bet- 
ter than it ever was by patience, perseverance 
and prudence. It's not to be accomplished 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 55 

overnight. There's no get-rich-quick way of 
doing it. Nature will do it herself if you'll 
give her time and let her alone. You may beat 
Nature's time if you'll put your mind to it; 
but you must follow her methods. Nature has 
a patent on the manufacture of humus; that's 
why. 

Well, then, we had a naturally good farm 
that had become unnaturally poor. Two 
things were to be done in reforming it. We 
had to clean up the surface, getting rid of stone 
and stumps and such-like litter, so that we 
might really cultivate our fields. That would 
take time and muscle. Then we had to get 
humus into the soil. That would take time and 
muscle — plus some thinking. 

The state university at Fayetteville includes 
the Arkansas Agricultural College. We went 
over there and began to pester the professors. 
We talked with the chemists, and the horti- 
culturists, and the agronomists, and the animal 
husbandry men, and every other man who 
looked or acted like an expert in anything. If 
we missed anybody in those interviews it was 
because he saw us coming and hid. They were 
certainly a fine lot of men. If the farmers of 
the United States, whose work is all at sixes 



56 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

and sevens, only knew of the help that awaits 
them at the great schools of farming, there 
would be another story to tell of husbandry. 
Little by little, during that summer, our prob- 
lem was simplified and the rough draft of a 
definite plan was made. The tangled mess of 
fractions we started with was reduced to its 
simplest terms ; the rather vague confusion of 
enthusiasms and questionings and uncertain- 
ties we had at the beginning was boiled down 
to a concrete idea. 

When we talked with one of the professors, 
I asked a question that had been lingering in 
the back of my head since our first encounter 
with our tenant and since we had first watched 
him at his work : 

"The man who's working that farm now says 
we're bound to starve to death if we depend 
upon farming it for a living. He looks pretty 
lean himself. We've never tried it; but we 
know that starvation would have its drawbacks. 
What about that? Is there a fighting chance 
of making a farm like that support a family 
decently?" 

He met the question gravely, as if that 
proposition had long since lost any suggestion 
of humor for him. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 57 

"If that land of yours is properly farmed," 
he said, "it can be made to produce more 
pounds of pork or beef to the acre, at less cost 
per pound, than the best farm in Nebraska or 
Iowa. That difference isn't all in the soil, 
though. It's mostly in our longer growing 
season and the greater range of crops we're 
able to use in meat production. We've shown 
that in our demonstration work here. That 
ought to answer your question." 

That did. Just to clinch the matter, he 
showed us the facts and figures in the demon- 
stration. There was no getting away from 
them. They must have satisfied anybody. 

"Well, that's all right, then," I said. "Now 
I'd like to visit some of the farmers around 
here who are doing that sort of thing in prac- 
tice. I'd like to see how closely they're follow- 
ing your methods in getting their results. If 
you'll give me the names of a few of them, 
we'll go to see them." And I got out my note- 
book and pencil. 

He hesitated for a moment. "Put up your 
book," he said. "There aren't any names to 
give you." If he'd been anybody but a teach- 
er, I think he'd have looked discouraged; but 
teachers have no business with discourage- 



58 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

ment. He contented himself with a mild- 
sounding reflection: "We can tell what's go- 
ing on in the soil, but we can't tell what's go- 
ing on in the minds of the farmers. They 
don't seem to be even interested in what we're 
doing, to say nothing of being interested in 
trying to do the same things themselves. Take 
the matter of clover, for instance. Come over 
and see our demonstration patches." We saw 
as fine clover as a bee ever buzzed over. "Yet 
you'll hear the farmers saying that clover can't 
be grown here," our professor said. "I doubt 
if there's one farmer in fifty, right in this dis- 
trict, who's ever so much as seen our clover, 
though this is a public institution, conducted 
for the farmers' special benefit. It's the same 
way with alfalfa, and the vetches, and soy 
beans, and all the rest of that list. They grow 
cowpeas a little; but there isn't one acre of 
cowpeas planted where there ought to be a 
thousand. The item of greatest importance in 
farming these soils is altogether left out of the 
farmer's practice. That's why the farms look 
so lean — and a lean farm makes lean farmers." 
After those talks we would go out home and 
sit on the fence some more and watch our man 
at his job, figuring him out. One thing was 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 59 

very plain : His trouble wasn't bodily laziness. 
Every day and every day he was out in the 
morning early; and all day long, till darkness 
stopped him, he worked at the very limit of 
his strength. No man could have put in longer, 
harder hours. Yet, as the season advanced, it 
was plain as print that he wasn't getting any- 
where; he seemed to be just standing on one 
spot and turning dizzily round and round. By 
the middle of the summer he was buying chops 
and baled hay for his mules, going in debt for 
the stuff, expecting to pay the debt out of his 
half of the crop. But there wasn't going to be 
any crop worth mentioning, though the sea- 
son had been an extra favorable one, with 
plenty of rain falling at exactly the right times. 
The cornstalks were dwarfed and pale, with 
half their ears mere "nubbins"; the patches of 
wheat looked like the patent-medicine pictures 
of "before taking." The wheat harvest was in 
mid-June. Those patches harvested six bush- 
els to the acre, and the yield of straw was 
hardly enough to stuff a bedtick. Everything 
else on the place figured out in just about that 
way. 

The tenant sold his half of the wheat at har- 
vest for seventy cents a bushel. That gave him 



60 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

two dollars and ten cents an acre. Counting 
only his own labor at one dollar a day, and say- 
ing nothing of the ''keep" of his team or the 
cost of thrashing, that wheat crop spelled a 
net loss. His corn gave him twelve bushels to 
the acre — six bushels for his share. His own 
labor on the crop at a dollar a day more than 
ate it up, to say nothing of the time of his 
mules and his wife and kids. 

That didn't appear very satisfactory to us. 
And only occasionally, as we rode around the 
country that summer, did we see a farm that 
was making a much better showing. Shiftless- 
ness might account for some of this, but it 
wasn't the only nor even the chief explanation. 
Nine-tenths of the farmers working within 
rifle shot of the agricultural college were doing 
no thinking, making no plans for any improve- 
ment in their methods. Some of them knew 
much better, but they stuck to the outworn old 
ways stubbornly. An ox in a treadmill is no 
more a victim of routine than these workers 
seemed to be. 

One day I repeated to our professor-friend 
the impression I'd received when I first looked 
on at our own tenant's work — that I felt as 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 61 

though I were looking on at something that 
might have happened a century ago. 

"You might as well make it forty centuries, 
while you're about it," he said. "Except that 
their tools are made of iron and steel, instead 
of wood and stone, the work of the farmers 
hasn't changed much in that time. I'm not 
hopeless about it, though. We're getting hold 
of the youngsters, a few at a time. They're 
learning; and when they go to farming they'll 
teach the others better than we can. It'll come 
out all right in the end." 

But we didn't want to wait for the end. So 
bit by bit through that summer, as we had seen 
our house plans grow through the years, a plan 
was made for the farm. We have stuck to 
that plan. Some of the details have changed 
from time to time, as our understanding has 
been broadened by experience ; but the idea re- 
mains to-day as it was six years ago. 

The essence of it is this: First of all, the 
farm must furnish food for our own table — 
not in a roundabout way, mind you, but di- 
rectly. Ninety per cent, of the farmers in our 
neighborhood were supplying their tables from 
the "store" — buying canned stuff, buying flour 
and meal and potatoes and salt meat, buying 



62 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

practically everything they ate. The only way 
they had of paying their store bills was by 
selling their corn and wheat — which they had 
grown at a considerable net loss. Only a few 
of the farmers knew how to put up sugar-cured 
ham and bacon. Gardening seemed to be a lost 
art. Dairying on the farms, for the sake of se- 
curing abundant home supplies of dairy prod- 
ucts, was next to unknown. If there were hens 
on a farm, the surplus eggs were exchanged 
at the store for meat; or if there happened to 
be a little "jag" of potatoes, this was swapped 
for butter. In all our going about we didn't 
run across one farm that was doing for itself, 
at first hand, all it was able to do in feeding 
the farmer's family. 

We intended to change that. No matter 
how much of our land it would take, we meant 
to make the farm furnish our table directly 
with milk and cream and butter, the best of 
meat, poultry and eggs, fruits and garden 
stuff. Our land must do that for us in the end ; 
so, we argued, why not let it be done directly? 
In quality and cost we could do better for our- 
selves in that way than if we got our food sec- 
ond-handed. The largest item in the cost of 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 63 

living must be taken care of first, and in a way 
that insured the greatest possible economy. 

The rest of our land — if there happened to 
be any left — ^we planned to devote to the grow- 
ing of grain and forage crops to be fed to live- 
stock on the farm, so that whatever we might 
have to sell, in the course of time, would leave 
the farm in the most highly finished form. 
When you figure it all out, taking everjrthing 
into account — labor, interest and taxes, loss of 
fertility, and the rest of the items — the average 
farmer who raises hay and corn to sell loses 
money by it. Hogs and cattle were to eat our 
crops at Happy Hollow. 

There was the plan we made, talking it over 
between ourselves and with the college folk, 
and reading everything we could find that 
would help us toward our end. The further we 
got into it, the clearer it became to us that we 
had undertaken a life-size task. Next year 
wouldn't see much of a change, nor maybe the 
year after that, in our yields of field crops. 
That was bound to take time. But at any rate 
we'd have the farm established on the right 
basis. 

That first merry month of May was a 
mighty moist month. Night after night it 



64 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

rained and rained. After a week or so it be- 
came just the least bit in the world monotonous 
to sit up all night with umbrellas over our 
heads to keep off the drip of the leaky roof — 
and monotony, you know, grows tiresome by 
and by. You can stand for a lot of disagree- 
able things if there's the tang of variety in 
them; but when that's gone they become flat 
and stale and unprofitable. We began to 
hanker for a tight roof over us and a dry bed. 
We weren't yet ready to figure on the big 
house; but we built the henhouse and moved 
into that for a while. It was well made, roomy, 
screened, and comfortable — a sight better than 
any of the homes on the farms surrounding us. 
We got leave of our tenant to build this house 
on the knoll where our real home would stand 
after a while, if we wouldn't let it lap over on 
his cleared land. We had to hack out a place 
for it in the heart of the thicket. I did that 
myself, working with brush-hook and ax, and 
then Lee and I did the carpentering. Neither 
of us knew beans about framing a building, but 
we got along. It beats all what you'll think 
you can't do till you try. Since that time I've 
done all sorts of things around the farm, from 
well-digging to practicing obstetrics in the pig 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 65 

lots, till now I'm ready to tackle just any kind 
of a job offhand, with serene confidence in the 
outcome. To my way of thinking, that's the 
best thing about farm work — you've got to be 
prepared for all manner of emergencies that 
you can't possibly prepare for. Maybe that 
sounds like an absurdity, but it isn't. 

Well, anyway, we built our chicken house. 
We took our time to it; but when it was fin- 
ished we had a kitchen, a dining room, and a 
big bedroom ; and the roof didn't leak — much. 
Instead of a campfire, Laura had a kitchen 
range to do her cooking. We set up our tent 
under a big tree for a sitting room or an over- 
flow bedroom; we cleared the undergrowth 
from a few square rods of ground beside the 
house and put up a big swing; we cleared out 
a temporary shelter for the chickens in a wild- 
plum thicket near by ; we staked out our cow — 
and there we were! Happy? Yes, we were 
happy. We'd secured a foothold. 

The jungle came right up to our doors. Sit- 
ting in the house, we couldn't see anything at 
all but a wall of matted growths. Inquisitive 
little gray and brown birds would come flitting 
out of the tangle, teeter on the long, swaying 
blackberry canes, and peek in at the windows. 



66 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

scolding us. They grew friendly before the 
end of summer. Little green lizards would 
flash about the walls or lie basking in the sun- 
light on our very doorstones, cocking their im- 
pudent heads slantwise and studying us with 
gold-rimmed, jewel-bright eyes. We scraped 
acquaintance with cottontails and pretty 
striped snakes that sought the warmth of our 
clearing; and once we found a fat 'possum 
curled up snugly in a hen's nest. All through 
the summer we rubbed elbows with wild things. 
From that first lodgment we widened our 
circle, clearing and cleaning up, fighting the 
thickets back. It was slow work and raw work, 
work that took us right back to first principles. 
There are no compromises in that kind of an 
undertaking. If there's a big stone to be 
moved, there's nothing else to do but to move 
it; if there's a tree to come down, you must 
simply go to work and chop it down. I liked 
that ; I haven't yet got over liking it. In a day 
like ours, with life made up so largely of ex- 
pedients and subterfuges and makeshifts, 
there's real value in tackling a rough, primitive 
task. When you've won out at it, there's no 
discount on your winning. There's no least 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 67 

element of luck in it; it shows for just what it 
is. It's real. 

Lee wasn't passionately fond of it, though. 
He found it humdrum. His genius didn't run 
that way. In those days all the genius he had 
was spent in inventing innocent-seeming ways 
of getting out of my sight in the brush, so that 
he might lie down and sleep. When he was 
gone, by and by I found a sleeping nest he'd 
made for himself, back in a clump of scrub 
oaks, screened in by thick hawthorn bush and 
lined with dry sedge grass. Sleep was with 
him an obsession. In the middle of a warm 
day when I'd see the little beads of sweat start- 
ing out on his forehead, I'd know to a moral 
certainty that he'd be drowsing off presently, 
no matter what he was doing. Once, when we 
were setting fence posts around a little clear- 
ing we wanted to use for pasture, we took turns 
swinging the big post maul — one driving and 
one steadying the post under the strokes. 
When his turn came to drive, I give you my 
word he managed to snatch a nap between 
strokes. When I went to the pile for another 
post, I found him stretched out on the grass 
and snoring ; and when we'd set the sharpened 
nose of the new post and I hauled off for the 



68 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

first lick, he rolled over on his back and slept 
again, taking the post with him, holding it 
clasped in his arms. He was right good at 
that. 

I had other help from time to time — some of 
the "hill billies." There were lots of them liv- 
ing around us then, in little huts cuddled down 
in sheltering nooks on the hillsides. Do you 
remember Charles Egbert Craddock's stories 
of the Tennessee mountaineers? They might 
have been written of our people. We got 
along with ours first rate, on the whole, though 
we looked at the shield always from opposite 
sides. My definition of Work wasn't in their 
dictionary at all. Their notion of a day's work 
consisted in leaning on an ax handle and con- 
versing, or squatting on a fallen log and con- 
versing, or settling their shoulders comfortably 
against a tree trunk and conversing. If I came 
within talking distance of one of them in the 
clearing, I had a conversation on my hands 
forthwith. They couldn't make us out at all — 
couldn't understand what folly we were up to. 
Those of them who linger in the country to-day 
— there are only a scattering few of them left 
: — can't understand what we've been driving at 
all these years, even with the visible signs be- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 69 

fore their eyes. Happy Hollow is a rank vio- 
lation of all native traditions. 

As we worked with the clearing through the 
spring and early summer, we were thinking of 
the big house. I had made up my mind that it 
would be built, somehow, before winter. One 
fact disturbed me a little: We knew we had 
stone enough at hand for every use in our build- 
ing, and we had expected to find that our forty- 
acre woodlot carried timber enough for logs 
for the house walls. We were disappointed 
there. The lumbermen had raked these woods 
clean of sound timber before our day, and the 
new growth wasn't yet far enough along for 
use. We had to give that plan up. 

As things turned out, we were better off for 
that seeming disappointment. Our standing 
luck had brought us a builder — a man who 
sensed exactly what we were after. Shivers 
run through me sometimes when I think of 
what might have happened if we hadn't stum- 
bled upon that chap — but, then, we did! He 
not only understood; he sympathized, which 
was worlds better. We had long sessions with 
him, sitting in the shade of our big wild-cherry 
tree, working out bills of material, discussing 
details. Our man was engaged for the job be- 



70 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

fore the discussions were over. It was not to 
be a "contract" job, with a lump sum in pay- 
ment. I was to buy all materials and pay for 
all labor by the day ; our builder would find the 
men and engage to keep them at their work, 
seeing that we got our money's worth. We 
trusted him. The work went through from . 
first to last without a bobble. 

The bills of lumber bashed me a bit, remem- 
bering the cost of lumber at the retail yards at 
Omaha. The log walls of the house alone, 
which were to be six inches thick, would take 
the equivalent of 22,500 board feet; and there 
were a couple of carloads of other stuff to be , 

got — sills, and joists, and framing material, I 

and flooring and roofing, to say nothing of 
shingles ; and our idea called for a multitude of 
oak and cypress doors and windows which 
would have to be built to our order. If we 
had to buy all this from the trade, even at the 
lower retail prices that ruled in Arkansas, our 
money wouldn't see us through. We had to 
find some other way. 

I went into the pine country in the lower 
part of the state, two hundred miles below Fay- 
etteville, and began rooting around through 
the woods, scraping acquaintance with the saw- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 71 

mill men. I found lots of little mills scattered 
around — free lances in the great lumber world. 
The men who owned these mills made a living 
by buying a scrap of timber too small for the 
big fellows to bother with and selling their cut 
to the larger companies. It was precarious 
business, for they had to squeak through on the 
narrowest margin of profit that would let them 
keep a-going. 

With one of these men I spent some time, 
camping with him, figuring with him. He 
agreed to cut my logs and timbers and rough 
lumber at the price the big mills were paying 
him — nine dollars a thousand feet, delivered at 
the nearest railway station. A small free- 
lance planing mill at that station would sur- 
face my stuff and load it on cars for one dollar 
a thousand feet. Pine lumber could be shipped 
from there to Fayetteville on a fifteen-cent 
rate. The surfacing, by reducing weight, 
would save more than its cost in freight. I 
would get what the lumbermen called "mill- 
run" stuiF, taking it just as it came from 
the saw, with the culls and "shakes" thrown 
out. That is to say, I would get about forty 
per cent, of what the trade knows as Number 



72 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

One, and sixty per cent, of Number Two. 
That's what I did get. 

I made my contract for everything our 
building would require that that mill could cut 
— three carloads. Those three carloads cost 
me $588.71; the freight charges to Fayette- 
ville came to $235.35. The funny little mill 
was tearing and snorting away at top speed on 
my stuff before I started back home. I had my 
"feet wet" now, for sure! 



IV 



We kept Christmas in our blessed farmhouse 
at Happy Hollow, before our great stone fire- 
place that was banked high, from hearth to 
throat, with a roaring blaze of huge logs from 
our woodlot. It needed the strength of two 
men to carry in the backlog. I had helped to 
cut those logs, working with crosscut saw and 
heavy ax in the woods; I had helped to load 
them on the woodrack and haul them down to 
the house over the rough, stony road. Every 
stone in the massive front of the fireplace Laura 
herself had found for the hands of the builders, 
tramping over the hills, choosing them care- 
fully. The finished work was very beautiful 
in its rich, soft grays and browns and reds and 
in its appearance of fine, solid strength. 
What's more, it was ours, achieved at last after 
eighteen years of waiting. When I'm an old 
man, by and by, and sit basking in the warmth 
of that hearth, brooding, I'll remember the 
fierce exultation that thrilled me as I knelt and 

73 



74 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

kindled that first fire on that Christmas eve, 
watching the little golden flames leap into life 
and flicker and crackle and rise at last, roaring 
up the chimney. It was the lighting of our 
altar fire. We loved it. 

After that, when little Peggy had been 
tucked in bed, my boy and I brought in her 
Christmas tree and set it up — a shapely cedar 
we had found near the house. Its slender point 
stretched up to brush the rafters of the high 
arched roof. We hung it thick with tinsel 
strings, and silver and gold stars, and gay 
cornucopias, and pink-sugared homemade 
cookies, and all manner of little gifts. When 
that was done, we sat before our fire and were 
content. 

The house was an accomplished fact. It was 
the desire of a lifetime realized. It seemed to 
have been wrought as by a sort of magic. In^ 
two months from the time the builders began 
their work, the walls had risen and the roof had 
covered them. There had been not a hair's 
breadth of change from our plans — no com- 
promise for depressing economy's sake. Back 
of the house, at the foot of our knoll, stood a 
huge barn, sheltering our farm horses and our 
half dozen cows ; and the chickens and the pigs 




FOR THE CHRISTMAS FIRE 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 75 

were comfortably housed. A storm blew that 
night, with a driving snow that drifted and 
curled about the house. The ground was white 
in the morning when we looked out of the win- 
dows across the swelling hills. Oh, it was a 
great Christmas! 

Our builder had done his work with rare 
judgment and skill, as no man of hidebound 
understanding could have done it. It was not 
a case for following traditions of the trade; 
our plans violated more traditions than they 
kept. A man without understanding might 
easily have ruined us in trying to carry them 
out ; but as it was we had kept within our limit 
of cost, and we had got exactly what we 
wanted. 

The logs for the walls had been squared on 
the saw to a uniform size of six by eight inches. 
Three sides had been surfaced on the planer, 
leaving the fourth side rough. With simple 
framing and strong mortising at the comers 
the logs were laid in tiers with "broken joints," 
each tier being tied to the one below it with 
twelve-inch spikes driven through. The chinks 
between the logs were filled with cement, so 
that when the walls were completed they were 
as one solid piece. Two huge stone chimneys 



76 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

rose above the wide-eaved roof, providing an 
open fire in every room in the house but the 
kitchen. After more than five years there is 
nothing we would change. 

Don't misunderstand. The house wasn't 
finished in all its detail. It isn't yet finished. 
Even with unlimited money we shouldn't have 
tried to hurry full final accomplishment. Pur- 
posely many things had been left for the slow, 
deliberate, thoughtful after-touch. Walls and 
ceilings were to be done in solid paneling of 
native hardwoods by and by, when we had 
time to study out the effects we wanted — and 
money to pay for the work. There must be no 
incautious haste in determining the lines of 
arch and nook and corner. Wide porches were 
to be added, too, and a pergola was to be built 
at the south. The lines of these must fit har- 
moniously with the lines of roof and wall. 
Driveways and walls were to be laid out, flow- 
ing into harmony with the house and its sur- 
roundings. There was no end of things to be 
done in the fullness of time. A home must 
grow and ripen. No amount of money, 
though it be spent with any degree of mad im- 
patience, will do the work of time in that 
growth and ripening. We knew that. Our 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 77 

children's children will find their part of the 
work awaiting them in giving beauty to Happy 
Hollow. That's our idea of the making of a 
home. We had made no more than a begin- 
ning; but we were content, for the beginning 
was flawless. 

Labor cost in this building had been just 
next to nothing. To write the figures seems 
to be making a jest of the matter — as if the 
job must have been "scamped" and crude. It 
wasn't. Our master builder drew three dol- 
lars a day — and he worked as one of the car- 
penters. The other woodworkers were paid 
two dollars a day, and the mason four dol- 
lars. Sometimes, when he could use them 
to advantage, the boss would have half a 
dozen men working with him; at other times 
he would use only two or three. He knew 
how to keep his crew keyed up and every man 
interested in what he was doing. There wasn't 
a "grouch" amongst them. Most likely Laura 
was responsible for the unvarying good tem- 
per of the men ; she cooked for them while they 
were at work. You know how that helps. 

I doubt if our performance might be dupli- 
cated, in the matter of low cost, in any other 
state on the map ; but the long and short of it 



78 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

is that materials and labor for our building 
cost us all told only about $2,000. For this 
money we had our big house, our huge barn, a 
three-room cottage for a farm hand, a log 
storeroom and laundry building, our poultry 
houses, and some odds and ends of sheds and 
shelters. We certainly got our money's worth. 
But for our defiance of some of the traditions, 
the cost might have been three or four times as 
great. 

Plans for our first season of real farm work 
went ahead through that winter with no end of 
eagerness but with a finger always on the throt- 
tle to check wasteful expenditure. The more 
we studied our proposition the more clearly we 
understood that we must go slow for a year or 
two in building up our fields and getting them 
fit for real farming. We had no money to 
waste through letting our eagerness run away 
with our prudence. 

Looking over the accounts of that first year, 
I can't put my finger on an item of real loss. 
Had we been experienced farmers of the old 
school instead of book farmers of the new or- 
der, we'd have spent our money differently, to 
be sure; but as I see it we shouldn't have got 
so satisfactory a return upon our outlay. It's 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 79 

the disposition of the old farmer to spend no 
money in farming unless he thinks he'll get 
it back again out of the current year's harvest. 
That's what you might call slot-machine farm- 
ing. A plan of operations that postpones 
profits for two or three years, even though it 
makes profits more certain in the end, isn't 
popular with the old-time practical farmer. 
But that was our plan. 

Our idea, carefully worked out, w^as that 
every dollar spent in cleaning up and smooth- 
ing out our land would not only guarantee bet- 
ter crop yields in the years to come, but would 
give us our money back through increased 
value of the land itself. The cost of hauling 
a load of stone from the fields and building it 
into a retaining wall to check the washing of 
our soil we looked upon as a part of our perma- 
nent investment. Besides, we argued, the effi- 
ciency of labor apphed to crop-growing on the 
cleaned fields must be greatly increased. We 
should have the greater efficiency of modern 
implements, which couldn't be used on those 
stone patches ; and we must inevitably get bet- 
ter harvests. It wasn't a one-year game we 
were playing; but we couldn't see how we could 
possibly lose. 



80 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

Judge whether we judged well. Farmed in 
the old way through the old years, the value 
of this land — its selling value, I mean — ^had 
stood stock still for a generation; its intrinsic 
value — its fertility value — ^was growing stead- 
ily less and less. If the old conditions had per- 
sisted, the land wouldn't sell for a nickel more 
to-day than we gave for it six years ago. Han- 
dled according to our early plan, the market 
value has jumped from $20 to $100 an acre. 
If we wanted to, we could sell out to-day for 
$100 an acre, plus the cost of our buildings. 
The increase in intrinsic or cropping value of 
the land has been still more marked ; our crop 
yields now are half a dozen times what they 
used to be at their best — and the limit of that 
increase isn't yet in sight. Of course crop- 
ping methods have had a great deal to do with 
making the increased yields; but the point is 
that the better methods wouldn't have been 
possible on the old fields. 

You can see that it's pretty hard to separate 
the money we've spent into operating expenses 
proper and permanent investment. I doubt if 
that's possible on any farm; the two are so 
closely interwoven that they react one upon 
the other in a hundred ways. No matter about 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 81 

the bookkeeping part just now. However the 
charges may be sifted out, you will see that 
our dollars have come back to us, over and 
over again. It's just as plain that some of our 
dollars had to be put in with no expectation of 
getting them back again from this year's har- 
vest, or next year's, or the next. All we could 
feel sure of was that they would come back to 
us in good time, many fold. 

This sounds a little bit over-sure, maybe, as 
if we claimed to have made our plan with a 
sort of infallible foresight, free of all error. 
Don't take it that way. Our work has been 
marked by nothing so much as freedom of 
change in details. We've changed in matters 
of detail as often as we've found we were mis- 
taken — and that's been very often. It's only 
our central idea that has persisted, unchanged. 
That's not subject to change, because it's right. 

Through the first winter, whenever it was 
possible, we were cutting brush and cleaning 
out fence-rows and corners, to square up our 
fields. When we got the farm the fields were 
shapeless; wherever one of them edged up to 
a rough place, there it would stop. The farm 
was gashed and torn with unsightly hollows 
and steep banks and rain- washed gulHes; the 



82 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

old rail fences yawed and zigzagged drunk- 
enly back and forth. We tore out all the 
fences at the beginning of our work, to 
straighten their lines; and we changed from 
rails to woven wire in rebuilding. It was a 
rough, heavy task, that first one. Between 
whiles, for variety, we hauled stone. 

Hundreds and hundreds of wagonloads of 
stone went off those fields in their first clean- 
ing. Just for the fun of it, I'd like to know 
how many tons of stone we strained and 
grunted over in the course of those months. 
I felt as if it must be running well up into the 
millions. It was the first time in my life that 
I'd pitted myself against a job that called for 
sheer brute strength and that seemed to have 
no end. Week after week I couldn't see that 
we were making any headway at all; I was 
almost ready to believe that stone breeds and 
multiplies by some uncanny process. We 
strained and grunted and hauled, and still there 
was stone. It didn't strike me so just then, 
but that was mighty good discipline. It begat 
patience, and it begat thoroughness. Once 
we'd started on the job, we doggedly wouldn't 
quit till it was finished. 

The hardest part of it all was in finding help. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 83 

I'd been used to thinking of the farmers' 
plaints about hired men as just one of the 
standing jokes — like the mother-in-law joke. 
Let me tell you, it's no joke at all. The only 
real loss we've had at Happy Hollow is repre- 
sented by the stubs of my checks that went to 
pay. the wages of lazy dawdlers who palmed 
themselves off on me as farm hands. Lee, my 
Kansas brunette, had petered out so soon as 
the real work began. After that X tried out a 
string of others; and one after another they 
too petered out. There was nothing in par- 
ticular the matter with any one of them ; there 
was just a general indisposition to work. I've 
never been a fussy boss; and I was offering 
better wages than any other farmer in the 
neighborhood was paying; but I drew blank 
after blank. The idea of putting in a full six- 
day week at farm work, summer and winter, 
was shockingly new. Generations of practice 
here in the hills had bred a habit of "laying 
by" a little jag of a crop in midsummer and 
taking the rest of the year easy, with an odd 
job now and then under pressure of extreme 
need. My notions were to my "hands" only 
vanity and vexation. They couldn't see the 
sense of working all the time when three days' 



84 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

pay a week would keep them in cornmeal and 
salt meat ; so three days' work a week was about 
all I got out of the best of them — ^until Sam 
came along, by and by. 

Sam didn't belong in this part of the coun- 
try. He just "blew in" from the hills of South- 
ern Missouri, where farming conditions are 
pretty much like the conditions of the Fay- 
etteville section. He was used to rough land, 
used to stone and timber, and used to handling 
the tools that would bring order out of such 
chaos as our farm was in. He wasn't of native 
stock; he was an Irishman with a fine set of 
arms and legs and shoulders — a big six-footer 
with a back of oak, an ineradicable grin, and a 
fairly unhuman passion for work. He's been 
with me a little more than five years now. 
My hat's off to him. He's been a sort of god- 
father to Happy Hollow. 

With Sam's coming, the problem of our 
stony fields was solved. Sam looked at them, 
and grinned ; he listened to my talk about what 
I wanted to do with them, and grinned; and 
then he went to work, grinning. While he 
worked, he, too, did some talking. I liked the 
temper of his talk. He wasn't figuring on lazy 
makeshifts ; he wasn't arguing that all this ex- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 85 

tra labor would cost more than the land was 
worth; he wasn't talking of the shiftless ex- 
pedients of farming from year to year. He 
talked of next year, and the year after next, 
and the long future. He saw exactly what I 
was trying to get at. I think he was honestly 
pleased at having a job that gave him oppor- 
tunity according to his strength. He flew at 
the stone-moving as if he'd found at last the 
very sort of task he'd been looking for all his 
life. 

Before he came, we had been putting stone 
into rough walls along the creek bottoms, plan- 
ning to save the soil that would be washed 
down from the fields. My theory of it was all 
right, though I'd had nothing in the way of 
practice for a guide. Some of my results made 
Sam's grin broaden into a laugh. He attacked 
one of my walls and began to tear it out, 
though it had a good fifty wagonloads of stone 
in it. 

"We'll move this down to the edge of the 
creek, instead of putting it here at the foot of 
the bank," he said. "If we leave it here, all 
that overflowed creek bottom is waste. Next 
winter I can clear the brush off the bottom 
and move the stone off the bank; and then if I 



86 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

keep turning the edge of the bank down when 
I plow, pretty soon we'll have it smoothed off. 
In a few years you'll have three extra acres 
of the best land on the farm on that bottom, 
instead of a piece of swamp." 

We have those three extra acres planted to 
corn this year. Last year we made a bumper 
crop of millet on them. They're rich as cream 
— they are the cream skimmed oflp the higher 
lands by the beating rains. The added value 
of those three acres and of the crops we've 
taken from them has just about repaid the cost 
of all the rock-hauling Sam has done in the 
five years of his service. 

We planned things in that first winter that 
must take another five years to accomphsh. 
If we ever get to a point where there's no new 
conquest to be undertaken, I think Sam will 
quit me. There lies his genius. His grin 
would fade forever and he'd settle into con- 
firmed melancholy if he had to work on the 
place after it's all smoothed out. 

When the early spring came, I bought plows 
to match my man's disposition; and for the 
first time since the Year One these fields had 
a real breaking. The tenant farmers had been 
only fooling with plowing, drawing trifling 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 87 

little furrows that didn't go four inches deep 
at the best. That was the rule hereabouts ; but 
it was all wrong. It did no more than loosen 
a thin sheet of soil over a packed "plow pan" 
of clay, leaving it as if by deliberate design to 
be washed and guttered by the summer rains. 
If it didn't happen to wash away, it was sure 
to dry out entirely between rains, for no water 
could enter the compacted subsoil. With our 
big plows and strong mules we tore into the 
tough "pan," ripping it up, mixing it with the 
surface soil. It was a rough looking job when 
it was finished ; it didn't promise much for the 
year's cropping. With the stiff clay, more 
stone came up; in spots, after the first rain, 
the fields appeared just about as stone-littered 
as ever. There was another winter's job of 
hauling ahead of us. We didn't care about 
that, though; we had given the land its first 
touch of real high life. I meant to be satisfied 
if we harvested anything at all that year. 

While our plowing was going on, some of 
the neighbors got into the way of dropping 
their own work to look on at ours. They had 
thought us crazy before; now they were sure 
of it. If our building had put a crimp in the 
rules, our farming burst them wide asunder. 



88 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

In all good faith, with the very best of neigh- 
boriy intentions, they cautioned us that we 
were not only inviting disaster but making it 
certain. It did no good to retort that slow 
starvation by the accepted neighborhood meth- 
ods of farming smacked strongly of disaster. 
It's a thankless task to try to talk any man out 
of devotion to ancient usages when you have 
no proofs to show on the side of your innova- 
tions. We had nothing to show as yet more 
convincing than a statement of what our work 
had cost. There was nothing for us to do but 
persist. We weren't sure enough of that year's 
harvest to venture any daring prophecies. It's 
disconcerting to make prophecies which don't 
fulfill themselves ; it's better to say nothing and 
saw wood. 

If our work in the fields was to be a waiting 
game, there seemed to be no good reason why 
we should not get quicker results with our 
kitchen garden. As I have told you, we meant 
to make the garden count for all that was pos- 
sible in supplying our table from the first, so 
that needless outlays might be cut off. 

Special care was given to the preparation of 
the garden acre near the house. Stone was 
cleared away early in the fall, and the land 




GOOD FOR GENERATIONS TO COME 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 89 

was broken and harrowed thoroughly, again 
and again. Around the old pole stable our 
tenant had used lay a waste of old manure, 
the accumulation of years. We moved this 
down and spread it over our patch, turning it 
under. In late winter it got another breaking, 
and still another before the first planting. We 
had a strong, deep seedbed, as well prepared 
as one season's handling could make it. 

We began our gardening early and kept at 
it through the summer. We were on f amihar 
ground there. For years before we came to 
the farm we had done successful gardening for 
our own needs. We were just as successful 
on the farm. There was nothing unique in 
our methods or our results ; but we were doing 
something that none of our neighbors was at- 
tempting. The gardens around us, on the 
farms that had any at all, held nothing more 
than a few poor potatoes and maybe a weed- 
grown patch of turnips. Most of these folks 
got their "greens" from the fields and waste 
places — "poke" sprouts, sour dock, lambs- 
quarters and dandelions. That's not bad eat- 
ing, if you want to know it ; but to depend upon 
that supply isn't exactly thrifty farming. Our 
garden gave us a great variety, with the choic- 



90 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

est of everything. We weren't trying to do 
market gardening; we were aiming only at 
supplying our own needs. WeVe stuck to 
that, and we shall keep it up. It pays. No 
equal acreage on the farm pays nearly so well, 
judged by its effect upon our household econ- 
omy. 

We set out asparagus beds that spring. We 
planted a vineyard of six dozen vines and a 
dozen varieties that were selected to give us 
choice grapes fresh for our table over the long- 
est possible season, from early summer to late 
fall. We planted an orchard on the same plan 
— a hundred and fifty trees of plum, peach, 
apple, apricot, cherry and pear — thirty or 
forty varieties. None of that was done for 
commercial purposes, it was all planned for 
the home. In time, of course, we would have 
a surplus to be sold; but that would be inci- 
dental. Our own dining-room and pantry and 
storeroom made the center of this scheme. 

The townsman's habit of taking care of his 
trees and his garden patch clung to us. On our 
acre of orchard at Omaha I had nursed my 
trees like so many babies, feeding, trimming, 
cultivating, keeping every one like a show- 
piece. The trees on the farm were handled in 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 91 

the same way. The grapevines were formed 
on an intensive renewal system. Part of this 
work was done for the sake of keeping up ap- 
pearances around the house, and part for the 
better returns we were sure to get by and by 
in fruiting. Nothing need be said in defense 
of that extra care. I speak of it only because 
it was a radical departure from the way such 
things had been done on neighboring farms. 
Farmers are proverbially careless of their or- 
chards everywhere. That's a part of the 
short-sighted habit of slighting everything that 
does not promise quick returns. Here in the 
hills if a farmer set out a few trees for home 
fruit they would be left to shift for themselves 
afterward — he would forget all about them for 
three or four or five years, until it was time 
for them to come into bearing. There's been a 
mintful of money lost on the farms by that 
thriftless trick. A follow-up system is just as 
necessary in bringing a farm to the profit- 
making point as in any other business. Lack- 
ing such a system, a farm springs a hundred 
leaks. The hardest work I've had to do with 
my farm helpers has been in persuading them 
of the wisdom of keeping things up. With 
neglected holes at the bottom, there's just no 



92 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

chance at all for an overflow of abundance at 
the top. If those wastes would be stopped, 
you'd hear far less sorrowful complaining that 
farming doesn't afford a decent living. 

Our poultry flock took a jump that spring 
from the townsman's couple of dozen to the 
farmer's couple of hundred. I shall have more 
to say about the hen proposition after a while. 
Also we were laying the foundation for high- 
grade dairy and pig herds. 

We had made one of our mistakes with our 
cows. In our first summer, seeing acres and 
acres of luxuriant wild grass going to waste 
on the uncleared lands among the rocks and 
the scrub growths, I had bought a dozen cows 
and a cream separator. The cows were good 
animals; each of them passed a satisfactory 
test at our university station. The station was 
taking cream from farmers at a very satisfac- 
tory price for butterfat. There was potential 
profit in our herd; indeed, for several months 
they gave a net profit of twenty-five to thirty 
dollars a month over everything, besides fur- 
nishing our table abundantly with milk and 
cream and butter and an unlimited quantity of 
skim milk for the young pigs. 

Before the end of the summer, though, we 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 93 

ran against a snag. Our wild pasture had 
been overstocked. The native grasses of the 
Ozark country are not to be depended upon 
throughout a season; they are sensitive to oc- 
casional drought, and they are not of a high 
type at best. In the late summer we were up 
against the necessity of buying feed or cutting 
down the herd. We cut it down, keeping the 
best animals as a basis for later rebuilding. 
From the universicy stables I had bought a 
fine blooded Jersey bull calf — he's "Billy For- 
tune" in the herd books. We kept him, of 
course. He's a lordly fellow now, with a fine 
string of youngsters to his credit on our own 
farm and over the neighborhood. In the end 
we were far better off for that trimming back. 
The mistake had entailed no loss. Indeed, we 
were left with a snug little balance on the other 
side. Just the same, we had misjudged con- 
ditions. We had discovered that dairying on 
any considerable scale must be a part of the 
waiting game. That was a part of the price 
we had paid for taking a run-down instead of 
a "going" farm. We should have to let our 
herds grow slowly, watching carefully, letting 
their growth keep pace with the increasing 
ability of the farm to feed them. We entered 



94 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

our second summer with only half as many- 
cows as we had bought to start with. That 
may look like a setback ; but it didn't strike us 
so after we had thought it over. We had 
gained some invaluable experience, and we had 
made a little money at the same time. That 
wasn't so bad. 



As our first summer of real farming slipped 
by, we had plenty of proofs that ours was not 
bonanza farming. If you were to judge our 
enterprise for the first two or three years by 
the figures on our books representing income 
in dollars and cents, you would be bound to 
call it a conspicuous failure. A skilled book- 
keeper with his conventional notions could 
have argued us inevitably into the poorhouse, 
without any trouble at all. He could have 
proved that, the way we were going, with our 
limited resources, we couldn't possibly escape 
catastrophe. 

I used to stand rather in awe of bookkeepers 
and their nice, methodical, exact work; but 
since weVe been at Happy Hollow I've re- 
joiced a thousand times that we hadn't ac- 
quired the bookkeeper's habits of mind. A 
retired bookkeeper taking a farm like Happy 
Hollow and carrying his professional habits 
with him must be a desperately unhappy man. 

95 



96 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

Who was the man that said figures can't 
lie ? They're the most shameless of liars. Lots 
of other folks have found that out. You can 
prove any proposition you are bent on proving, 
if you'll only devise a complicated hard-and- 
fast system of accounting. 

Here's one point the bookkeepers always 
overlook in judging a venture like ours: The 
operation of a farm home is radically different 
from the mere cropping of a tract of land for 
direct profit. If we had bought Happy Hol- 
low as an investment pure and simple, intend- 
ing to run it purely and simply as a business 
that must pay profits in dollars and cents re- 
alized from the sale of products, then the book- 
keeper's arguments would be sensible enough 
and worth heeding. The non-resident farm 
owner who is cultivating his land by the tenant 
system or with hired labor, growing the staples 
for market, is in that case. He may consider 
his land as he would consider a bond or a bunch 
of bank stock. At the year's end his book- 
keeper can show him to a nicety whether he has 
had a satisfactory return upon his investment. 
Whether it will pay to keep on at the business 
is a question to be settled by plain, cold busi- 
ness judgment. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 97 

That's all right. But when you begin to 
consider the farm home, with the farmer and 
his family living on the land, then you bring in 
a hundred and one new and elusive factors that 
simply defy any inflexible system of business 
reckoning. I'm not talking about purely sen- 
timental factors, but of those things that will 
appeal to the most intensely practical of men 
who hasn't a fiber of sentiment in his make-up. 

During our first summer of actual farm 
work, we couldn't even guess how long it would 
take us to get the place built up to the point of 
yielding satisfactory field crops; but in the 
meantime we were continually taking stock of 
conditions, making curious appraisal of our 
life. 

Naturally enough, we made our first com- 
parisons with the life we had known before we 
took to farming. Leaving out enthusiasms 
and keeping strictly to those items which may 
be written with the dollar mark, this is the way 
the matter stood in our understanding: 

The money we were spending on the land in 
clearing, stone hauling, wall building and in 
such-like ways, and in the first deep, thorough 
breaking of our cultivated fields, was money 
invested ; the increase in value that was surely 



98 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

following these improvements gave a greater 
profit than we could possibly have secured on 
any other sound investment. Every dollar we 
put in was doubling itself. We had nothing 
to worry about on that score. Our one care 
was to plan this field work so as to have it in- 
telligent, and so as to keep within the sum we 
felt free to use in that way. I've touched upon 
this point before; I refer to it again because 
of its bearing upon our summing up of things 
at this time. Our field work in the first year 
or two wasn't chargeable to expense, as on a 
"going" farm. The crops we got in those 
years would suffice to feed our work team at 
least ; so we would "break even" there. I think 
we could have induced even the fussiest of 
bookkeepers to see the matter so. 

Our table living was costing us nothing at 
all, even at that stage. That's literally true. 
In town our outlay for groceries and meat had 
been about $600 a year, and we were getting 
no more than any townsman gets for his money 
— stuff that at its best was only fair-to-mid- 
dling. At the end of our first year of work, 
when Laura balanced her housekeeping ac- 
counts, she dared me to guess what we had 
spent in that year for table supplies. It 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 99 

amounted to only a few cents over $100. That 
had gone for coffee and sugar and flour and 
the few things we couldn't grow for ourselves. 
Surplus sold from garden and dairy and poul- 
try yards, now a little and then a little, had 
more than offset the sum spent for these sta- 
ples. The difference paid the cost of our 
gardening. Poultry and cows were paying for 
their "keep" in the increase of flocks and herd 
and in the value of manure that went out, care- 
fully husbanded, to our fields and orchard and 
garden. The supplies that went upon our 
table from all these sources stood as profit 
earned and paid. I'm not talking figuratively 
when I say that our farm was already saving 
us $600 a year as compared with the cost of 
living as we'd known it in town. We'll get to 
a closer analysis of some of these figures by 
and by; I'm just lumping them now. 

To put it another way, we had to use in that 
year only $100 in money in the business of 
feeding the family, to effect exchanges that 
couldn't conveniently be made directly. That 
narrow margin deceived some of our friends 
who weren't used to our way of doing things. 
I had done some talking in the earlier months 
One of the bankers of Fayetteville, with whom 



100 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

of our work, joked me about the result of the 
year's work. 

"It hasn't come out very well, has it?" he 
asked. 

"The best ever!" I said. "I'm perfectly 
satisfied." He thought I was doing some jok- 
ing in my turn. 

"You didn't sell anything this fall off the 
farm," he said. You see, he'd grown accus- 
tomed to the practice of the farmers of selling 
a crop of grain at harvest and using the pro- 
ceeds to pay store bills that were run up dur- 
ing the year. 

"No," I tried to explain, "we're not selling 
anything, except some surplus butter and eggs 
once in a while. What the farm produces 
we're eating ourselves." 

He laughed at that, as a banker may laugh 
at a customer's not-too-humorous jest. "Hom- 
iny and hay, eh?" he returned. "How do your 
folks like it?" 

"We never lived so well in our lives before," 
I said. I went into detail a little then, trying 
to make our theory plain. "If we're not selling 
much," I contended, "you'll notice we're not 
buying much either. We're making our farm 
do for us what the grocer and the commission 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 101 

men and the traders do for most of these farm- 
ers, and so we're saving the profits and rake- 
offs on a lot of exchanges back and forth, don't 
you see?" 

He saw but dimly. "Oh!" he said. "You're 
not intending to do commercial farming, 
then?" Fixed habit of mind is hard to break. 
I've talked with other men, farmers included, 
who held the same opinion of our enterprise. 
One business man in town solemnly argued 
that we couldn't possibly be making a success, 
for the reason that the farm wasn't showing 
any "turn-over." To his way of thinking, the 
couple of hundred dollars' worth of stuff we'd 
sold represented all the business we had done 
for the year. Even if that was all profit, he 
contended, it was a starvation income. 

"Starvation be jiggered!" I said. "We're 
living on the fat of the land. Here's the point : 
Our *turn-overs' are being made inside our own 
farm fence lines, instead of in town. We're 
turning our grain and hay and forage into milk 
and eggs and butter and meat, instead of sell- 
ing them and buying milk and eggs and butter 
and meat. You simply can't beat our system. 
It would have to come to the same thing in the 
end, wouldn't it — just feeding the family? 



102 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

And this way we keep all the profits for our- 
selves." 

He shook his head over it. He's still shak- 
ing his head over it. With all his business 
training and sagacity — and he's a successful 
business man — he couldn't make out that we 
were doing anything better than silly trifling. 
The small amount of money we had changed 
from hand to hand, which to our understand- 
ing was the greatest strength of our proposi- 
tion at that stage, to his understanding stood 
for a vital weakness, a weakness that must 
bring us to disaster pretty soon. 

"You aren't making trade!" That's the 
fault folks found with our scheme. Neverthe- 
less, our system was our salvation in our first 
years. We must have "bumped the bumps" 
if we had taken the way our friends urged 
upon us. That's the simple truth. 

When I say that our table living cost us 
nothing, to be sure I haven't set a price upon 
the time we spent on the garden and the chick- 
ens and the rest. I don't see how that can be 
done, in making a comparison with our town 
conditions. We spent no more time here in 
the new ways than we had spent in town at our 
housekeeping and at keeping things up around 




EVERYTHING FOR THE TABLE AT BARE COST OF PRODUCTION 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 103 

our home. We had changed the uses we were 
making of our hours, that was all; we had just 
about as much leisure as ever. Besides, the 
abundance of everything, and all of first qual- 
ity, was to be considered. 

Then there was the matter of rent. I don't 
quite know how to get at that, so as to satisfy 
everybody. A house like our farmhouse 
couldn't have been hired in town — one afford- 
ing such ample room, I mean — for less than 
$100 a month. We had never paid any such 
rent; but there's the fact. We were living as 
we had always wanted to live, though we hadn't 
been able to afford it. If I credit Happy Hol- 
low Farm with rent at $100 a month, that 
would repay the whole cost of the house in 
sixteen or seventeen months — which doesn't 
seem exactly reasonable, does it? I'll tell you 
what I'll do with you: I'll call it $50 a month 
and let it go at that. So there's another $600 
a year to the good. 

Then there's the cost of fuel. To heat our 
house in town used to set us back $150 to $200 
every winter, the cost varying according to 
weather conditions and fluctuations in the price 
of coal. At Happy Hollow we've burned ten 
cords of wood a year in heating and cooking. 



104 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

It has cost us about eighty-five cents a cord to 
cut this wood and bring it down to the house 
from the hill — $8.50 a year. In getting out 
this supply we're cleaning up the woodlot, tak- 
ing out the dead-and-down, the broken and the 
too-old trees, leaving the young and thrifty 
timber to grow. That is increasing the value 
of our woods many times more than the work 
is costing; but let that go. Say we're saving 
$150 a year on fuel. That makes a total sav- 
ing on the three principal cost-of-living items 
of $1,350 a year. Mind you, we were living 
better than we had ever been able to live on 
that amount of outlay. 

And then there's the matter of health. We 
had always been tolerably sane livers, and none 
of the family had any leaning toward invalid- 
ism ; but in town I was always paying doctors 
for something or other. I don't remember 
what those bills amounted to in the course of a 
year, but they came in as regularly as the gro- 
cery bills. As nearly as I can figure it, $100 
a year would be about right. That was cut off 
short when we came to the farm. What they 
say about fresh air, fresh food, vigorous exer- 
cise and sound sleep must be true. For two 
solid years there wasn't a doctor on the place, 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 105 

except once when my boy was bucked off a 
horse and had his collar bone broken. The 
gain in health can't be measured ; but the sav- 
ing can. We'll leave that out of the reckoning, 
though; you may think I'm bearing down too 
strong on this part of the matter, trying to 
make out a case. 

Seriously, can you find any flaw in that way 
of looking at things? I can't. Maybe it 
wouldn't altogether suit our friend the book- 
keeper; he might want to apportion some of 
the items differently, so as to make them gee 
with his own theories of accounting; but he 
couldn't escape the conclusion that even at the 
beginning we were on a secure footing. 

The charges to be made against the enter- 
prise — interest on investment, taxes, insurance 
and depreciation of machinery and equipment 
— amounted to $400. In that year we paid 
$500 for labor on the land. Those two items 
were counterbalanced by increased value. So 
it boils down to this : Life at Happy Hollow 
was saving us at least $100 a month the year 
round as compared with life in town. I 
couldn't get away from that if I wanted to. 
And we were living in a dream come true! 
Don't overlook that. 



106 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

Our field crops in that first year didn't turn 
out so badly. Our college friend had said that 
good farming ought to let us get seventy-five 
bushels of corn to the acre on our land, once 
the farm had been brought up to normal. Of 
course we hadn't expected to do so well as that 
in the first season. Our harvest gave us 
twenty-six bushels to the acre. As that was 
more than twice as much as our tenant farmer 
had been getting, we managed to feel pretty 
well satisfied. The average corn crop in all 
the states over a ten-year period was just 
twenty-six bushels to the acre. We had 
nothing to complain about. We had saved 
a pretty fair crop of hay — cowpeas, millet, 
sorghum and oats cut "in the milk"; and 
there was a lot of corn fodder. Our new clear- 
ings had brought into use several acres of wild 
grass pasture. That wasn't nearly so good as 
the pastures we could make by and by; but it 
had carried our few cows over seven or eight 
months with only a little extra feeding. 

When cold weather came on, we put up our 
next year's supply of sugar-cured hams and 
bacon. That was new work, but we did every 
lick of it ourselves, according to directions 
given us at the university experiment station. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 107 

Five pigs of two hundred and fifty pounds 
weight were put through their paces; twenty- 
plump hams and shoulders and twenty strips 
of brown sweet bacon hung in our smokehouse, 
in the smudge of green hickory chips. Don't 
you like that smell? I used to go out in the 
chill of the early mornings and hang around 
the smokehouse for a while and sniff, to 
get up an appetite for breakfast. There 
were big cans of sweet lard in the store- 
room, too. For a while, at butchering 
time, we lived, let me tell you! Rich spare- 
ribs — no butcher shop ribs, with a thin shred 
of meat discovered now and then between the 
bones, if you're lucky ; but ribs with real meat 
on them, coming to the table crisped and odor- 
ous, so that for all one's town-learned manners 
he couldn't to save his life keep from oiling his 
face from ear to ear. And home-made sau- 
sage, seasoned with sweet herbs gathered fresh 
from the garden and dried between clean 
cloths! Honestly, I'm sorry for the man who 
hasn't experienced real farm sausage. Ple- 
beian? Is that what you think of it? Indeed 
and it's not! I wish you might sit down just 
once to a Happy Hollow breakfast in Janu- 
ary, when a hot platter comes to the table filled 



108 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

with thin sausage cakes, cooked to the perfec- 
tion of a deep brown turn, and a dish of golden 
corn-cakes to dip the brown gravy over. Ple- 
beian? Fudge! Why, the great gods in their 
most divine longings couldn't beat it. There 
ought to be a poetry of sausage; plain prose 
has such pesky limitations. 

Not a little of the sub-conscious satisfaction 
of eating such food hes in your having been 
intimately acquainted with the pig that pro- 
duced it. Butcher shop eating, the best you 
can make of it, is a sort of catch-as-catch-can 
business. It's a lot better if you have it in the 
back of your head that your pig was brought 
up as a gentleman — a very Chesterfield of the 
pig family, fed on clean pastures and skim 
milk and sweet grain. There's a Fifth Avenue 
as well as a slumdom in pig life. If you're 
running the pig nursery yourself, you can be 
comfortably sure that you're not eating a Billy 
the Dip. You'd rather like that, wouldn't 
you? 

We weren't living on pig alone. There were 
the chickens, too. We had fancied we knew 
something about chicken-eating before we came 
to Happy Hollow. We had eaten chicken 
clear across the continent, from Boston to San 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 109 

Francisco, and from Canada to the Gulf; 
chicken Creole, and chicken Maryland style, 
and chicken in casserole, and chicken in pot and 
pan and kettle ; chicken fried, and roasted, and 
broiled, and stewed, and boiled; chicken soup, 
and chicken with dumplings, and chicken with 
rice, and chicken with chili; chicken in every 
style in the books, from just plain chicken on 
up to chicken fixed so fussy it's own mother 
wouldn't mourn for it. Yes, sir, we thought we 
knew all about chicken-eating. 

But we didn't. The fact of it is that there's 
only one real way to fix up a chicken for eat- 
ing, and we hadn't known a blessed thing about 
it till we had an inspiration and did it for our- 
selves. 

It's a particular job. If you're a quick- 
lunch fiend, or one of those dull fellows who 
insist upon having dinner on the table at twelve 
sharp and then fight your way through with it 
with both hands furiously, so you can get the 
empty dishes stacked up and go back to your 
work in a hurry, you won't understand what 
I'm talking about. There are others who will 
know. John Ridd would sympathize. So 
would old Sam Weller. I'd give a pretty 
penny for the privilege of cooking a chicken my 



110 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

way for one of the Nodes of Christopher 
North and the Ettrick Shepherd and Timothy 
Tickler. I sure would! 

You know how the recipes start off in the 
books: "Take a chicken." But that won't 
do. You know what you're liable to get when 
you just "take a chicken" — one of those 
scrawny, blue-skinned caricatures that would 
make a tramp feel he'd been cheated if he stole 
it. The chicken that's consecrated to this 
Happy Hollow cookery must be picked out 
with as much care as you'd use in picking the 
horse you expected to bet on at a Derby. We 
pick 'em out from the flock in the yards when 
they're half grown; and when they're selected 
they go into training. It's not training down, 
but training up. For the rest of their lives 
they live in chicken paradise, fed on clean grain 
and milk and green clover, so that they grow 
lustily. A spring Orpington with that sort of 
feeding will be an eight-pounder or better at 
Holiday time, a perfect picture of what a 
chicken ought to be — plump as a toy balloon, 
with the plumpness in tender meat, and only a 
little loose fat distributed around here and 
there under his yellow skin. When he's dressed 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 111 

■ — I mean when he's stripped for action, he'll 
look mightily puffed up and proud. 

This chicken doesn't come into the house by 
the back way and stay in the kitchen till din- 
ner's ready. He comes right on into the big 
living-room and lies on the table in a deep pan, 
so that folks may walk around him and admire 
him and be getting acquainted with his points. 
An hour or so before the real cooking starts 
I've built up one of those roaring fires of hick- 
ory and oak in the great fireplace, piling it 
high, coaxing the brick lining to glow red with 
ardent heat. When it can't get any hotter, 
then the chicken is hung from the stone mantel, 
head down, by a heavy string with a short wire 
leader, as close to the blaze as possible without 
touching it. A dripping pan, holding pepper 
and salt, lies on the hearth beneath him. Stand- 
ing at one side, with a big spoon tied at the end 
of a long stick, I start him to turning slowly, 
very slowly. I have to shield my face against 
the heat ; but that's all right. Nothing less in 
the way of a fire will do. 

It's only a minute or two till the drip starts, 
and in five minutes the yellow skin begins to 
crisp and blacken. If you aren't used to any- 
thing but those lean and thready chickens of 



112 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

the markets, you'd think this one must take 
fire and burn up. He won't, though, not with 
all that wealth of juice in him. I'm trying to 
sear the skin over thoroughly, so the juice will 
stay in. As the fat trickles down into the pan, 
I keep dipping it up over him, to hurry the 
browning. 

Now watch him. He's turning and turn- 
ing. The first thing you know you'll see oily 
yellow bubbles swelling under the skin on 
breast and back and thigh. They swell and 
swell till they're big as eggs; and then they 
burst and jets of oily steam shoot out with a 
sound like a penny whistle. Just sniff that 
steam, now ! The room will be full of that odor 
before we're through; you'll have to stand it 
for an hour. 

The fire may sink a bit, now that the skin is 
crusted. All we have to do now is to turn and 
turn, and keep dipping up the drippings, and 
wait. It's no trouble to tell when he's done; 
the tender meat begins to pull away from the 
leg-bones, and his whole body takes on a sort 
of ripe, finished look, and there's an unmistak- 
able finished smell in the sputtering steam. 
The best sign, though, is that you simply can't 
wait any longer. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 113 

Now, then, you take a shaving of that white 
meat and a little slice off the thigh, piping hot, 
and a brown roll with sweet butter and apple 
jelly, and tell me if that isn't real chicken eat- 
ing I Oh, man, dear! Some of these times I'm 
going to write a cook-book, and there won't be 
another thing in it but young chicken roasted 
before a roaring open fire. 

We really lived at Happy Hollow in that 
second winter. For my own part, I was find- 
ing sheer delight in every least scrap of the 
experience. It seemed to me that this life 
was as clear of the rubbish of living as any on 
earth could be. That suited me, down to the 
ground. I had never been strong for the frills 
and fixings. Simphcity was the thing — not 
the ajBPected austerity of the ascetic who tor- 
tures himself into that state of mind, but the 
sort of plain living that lets a man keep his 
time for the things he thinks essential — for real 
work or real leisure. We had kept our town 
life with our friends down to that basis as well 
as we could; but you know how the odds and 
ends of trifling "obligations" will pile up on 
you. We had always disliked wasting time on 
empty formalities that did nobody any good, 
but we hadn't been strong-minded enough to 



114 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

keep free of them altogether. We could have 
that freedom on the farm. People who would 
travel to Happy Hollow over that crazy coun- 
try road would do it because they really wanted 
to see us; and we would think twice before 
we'd go bumping into town on a useless er- 
rand. That's the way the matter sifted itself 
out in my head. 

I wasn't so sure of Laura's feeling, for we 
had never thrashed it out together in plain 
words. We had had a year and a half on the 
farm before we got to that point. Then one 
morning the chance came. 

It was a gorgeous morning in December; 
the sort of winter morning that comes to us 
here in the Ozarks often and often, crisp and 
tonic but without a trace of the raw cold of 
the North. Sunrise acted itself out for us in 
crimson and gold finery as we stood together 
at our kitchen door, looking off across the hills. 
A broad, curling ribbon of white fog lay over 
the river, shrouding the valley, with great tree- 
tops stabbing through here and there. The 
sun touched the fog warmly; it lifted and 
drifted softly up the long hill-slopes to the 
southward, hung for a little time from the 
peaks in rose-tinted plumes, then soared into 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 115 

the high air. Far as we could see the valley 
opened out and out in the crystal-clear light, 
brimming with peace and beauty. 

"Aren't those hills wonderful!" Laura said 
by and by. "They're never done with sur- 
prising me. I think this is the most beautiful 
spot in the world." 

"Is it good enough to pay you for being a 
farmer's wife?" I asked. 

Laura didn't accept the challenge to an ar- 
gument. Her eyes were fixed on the distances. 
"There isn't a thing there," she said, "that 
doesn't seem worth while." 

That was the very thing! I didn't press my 
fooUsh question. 



VI 



We had a diversion in our second winter at 
Happy Hollow. In November one of the 
members of the staff of the Saturday Evening 
Post came out to visit us, on a hunt for "copy." 
I had done some work for the Post in the days 
before we took to farming, and the visit was 
a renewal of old acquaintance. We fooled 
around the farm and through the woods and 
over the hills for a few days, talking; we had 
a brace of young Orpingtons roasted before 
the big fire; we argued about a number of 
things. The sum of it was that I undertook 
to write a little story of our farm and of the 
fun we'd had in our adventure. 

The story was printed in January of 1910. 
It was the story of a transplanted townsman 
who had found for himself some of the world- 
old happiness of home-making. 

The day that story appeared, letters began 
coming to us. Within a week they were com- 
ing by fifties in every mail; in another week 

116 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 117 

they were coming by the hundred. They ar- 
rived from every nook and corner of the world ; 
from Cape Town, and Copenhagen; from the 
Argentine Republic and from Northern Man- 
churia ; from New Zealand and Yucatan ; from 
Egypt and from the Arctic Circle. Within the 
next three months, when we quit keeping 
count, we had more than 3,500 of those letters 
stacked up. Still they came. They're still 
coming, for that matter, now and then. 

Those thousands of letters were strung upon 
a single thread of living interest: Was our 
story fact or fiction? Was it actually possible 
for a pair of average mortals in this mortal 
life, without a special dispensation of Provi- 
dence, to find what we had found, to do what 
we had done? Would there be a fighting 
chance that the writers might do for themselves 
such a thing, having a little money and plenty 
of courage and strong desire ? They were won- 
derfully human, those letters ; wonderfully in- 
timate; rich in revelation of feeling. There 
wasn't a formal note in the lot; some of them 
covered close- written pages and pages. It has 
been a lasting regret that we couldn't answer 
them all as we wanted to. We tried, spending 



118 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

long hours at it every day; but we couldn't 
keep up. 

People began coming to see us, too; a few 
at first, and then more and more. When 
spring opened, on some days we'd have a score 
of folks on the place, walking around, poking 
into things and asking questions. Like the 
letters, they came from everjnvhere — from 
every state in the Union, from Mexico and 
Canada, and even from across the big water. 
One man came straight from Manila to Fay- 
etteville. They weren't merely curious; they 
were vividly interested, for in the making of 
this farm home they found something of their 
own ideals wrought into tangible form. 

During that spring and summer and fall we 
had a couple of thousand visitors. Day after 
day we didn't try to do anything but meet them 
and talk with them. It was very interesting, 
very illuminating. We enjoyed every minute 
of it. It did us good in many ways. The con- 
crete good of it was that it brought into the 
country around Fayetteville scores of men and 
women who had the daring to give their desires 
a practical try-out. In the four years that have 
passed, two or three hundred newcomers have 
settled hereabouts. They have made a great 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 119 

change in the face of the land and in all living 
conditions. 

Some of these people were practical farm- 
ers ; most of them, and those who interested us 
most, were townsfolk. There's no need to say- 
much about the farmers. They have suc- 
ceeded according to their deserts, just as they 
would have succeeded anywhere. Their ques- 
tion was simply a question of change of loca- 
tion. With the townsmen it was different. 
They are worth considering a bit here, I think. 
There are few spots on the map where within 
so short a time so many people have actually 
tried this back-to-the-land proposition under 
conditions like ours. There has been a sort of 
community spirit among us ; we have been able 
to keep track of one another and to judge 
of the reasons for success or failure. 

There have been some real successes, and 
some flat failures. Success hasn't seemed to 
depend essentially upon the amount of money 
a man might bring with him in his hands, nor 
upon his age, nor upon his earlier training, nor 
upon any early familiarity ^vith the theory or 
practice of good farming. Some have failed 
though they had plenty of money to start with ; 
some have made it go though they had to hus- 



120 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

band their two-bit pieces carefully. Some have 
failed who could talk book-farming glibly; 
some have succeeded who at the beginning 
couldn't tell the difference between a "middle 
buster" and a corn planter. Some have failed 
who were at the height of youthful vigor; some 
have succeeded who were gray and time- 
seamed. At first glance there doesn't seem to 
be any rule for it ; but when you think over it, 
it has come out quite logically. Really there 
isn't any mystery. 

At the very bottom of success in every one 
of these cases has been that gift of mind that's 
called initiative. In spite of the load of abuse 
it's had to carry lately, that word still has life 
and meaning in it. In this case it means abil- 
ity to slough old habits of thinking and to do 
fresh, vigorous thinking to fit new conditions 
of life and work. A preacher or a dentist or 
a lawyer who turns farmer must quit thinking 
in terms of theology or dentistry or law and 
begin thinking in terms of the soil. He must 
be able to adapt himself, not only bodily but 
mentally. If he can do that, he's started on 
the right road; if he can't, he's running up a 
blind alley. This isn't the place for giving ex- 
amples and illustrations. You'll just have to 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 121 

take my word for it that I'm stating the fact 
fairly as we've seen it here. Many of these 
people had been successful home-makers on 
their town lots, with gardens and chickens and 
flowers; but they couldn't change their think- 
ing from the square yard to the acre. Acres 
overwhelmed them. 

We've had another point well illustrated 
here ; a point that ought to be obvious enough, 
though it's too often ignored. The man who 
said that poets are born, not made, didn't ex- 
clude the other callings from his rule. The 
rule is just as good for farmers as for poets. 
That is to say, the man who succeeds at farm- 
ing must have the flair for it. It isn't enough 
to be convinced that farming may be made a 
good, paying business ; one must be a thorough 
convert to the soil. We've known men here- 
abouts who came to their new farms with most 
impeccable schemes of business management, 
but who fell down disastrously because, when it 
came to the critical point, they were hopeless 
aliens to the land. I don't know any better 
way of saying it than to use a rather vague 
phrase : The successful farmer must love the 
soil, feeling himself akin to it. Love of the 
good earth makes a far better beginning than 



122 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

an exact knowledge of soil chemistry. One 
may learn his chemistry afterward out of the 
text-books; but love isn't to be mastered so. 
It's all well enough to pooh-pooh sentiment, 
to say that sentiment has no place in business, 
and all that; but that's poor talk. I've never 
known a man who had made a conspicuous suc- 
cess at farming or anything else without a sen- 
timental attachment for his job. Sentiment's 
the thing! Honest to goodness, I'd as soon try 
to live with a wife I didn't love as to work with 
an acre I didn't care for. With that feeling 
left out, farming is no more than an expedient 
— just a hard way of making a living. The 
hardships and discouragements take on vast 
proportions. That's been worked out before 
our eyes here, many and many a time. 

We've seen this, too : There comes a time in 
the farming experience of every townsman 
when novelty wears off and some of the rough 
facts begin to loom large. Laura says it's just 
like the critical "second summer" in the life of 
a baby. The enterprise is past its first in- 
fancy; it's cutting its teeth and learning to 
walk; it's having a lot of knocks and bumps 
and pains. In that period it needs some care- 
ful nursing if it's to be pulled through — and 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 123 

that's the very time when lots of folks make up 
their minds that they've tackled too big an 
undertaking. Success or failure is likely to be 
settled right there. You can see how that may 
be. Suppose you were the man in the case. 
Suppose you had been spending a long string 
of hot summer days in a new field, toiling at 
unfamiliar work, coming in at night dead 
weary and stained with earth and sweat and 
with rows and bunches of blisters scattered 
around over you. Suppose you weren't wise 
enough to judge whether your year's crop 
would amount to anything, for all this labor. 
Suppose you sat out on the porch after supper, 
brooding over the lonesomeness. Suppose 
you'd forgotten to buy smoking tobacco the 
last time you were in town. And suppose — 
just suppose — that your wife had said some- 
thing just the least bit fretful or peevish about 
something that had gone wrong with her work. 
It's just possible that you'd conjure up a pic- 
ture of your old familiar town streets at night, 
with the bright lights, and the picture shows, 
and the tobacco shops on every other corner, 
and all the stir and bustle and gayety you used 
to know so well. If that keeps up, and if 
something happens that puts a little crimp of 



124 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

discouragement in you at the wrong moment, 
it's supposable that you may come to a sudden 
snap judgment and chuck the whole thing and 
turn your face "back home." We've seen them 
do that. We've seen many a case where suc- 
cess might very well have come if the lightly 
balanced scales of decision had only tipped the 
other way in the critical hour. 

I'm not writing mere abstract arguments 
now; I'm giving the sum of scores of actual 
experiences that have been lived out around 
us. It comes to this: Success hangs upon 
state of mind more than upon any externals. 
In the last four years we have been much dis- 
turbed by the spectacle of eager, hopeful men 
and women surrendering to discouragement 
and failure. But we have seen others achieve 
happy success. If we tried to deduce from 
these cases a rule that would prescribe how old 
a man ought to be, or how much money he 
ought to have, or what he ought to do upon his 
land to make the game win for him, we'd have 
to give it up. But if you want a rule, if you 
must have a rule of some sort that will guide 
the back-to-the-lander, here's one : 

Get hold of your farm and then make violent 
love to it and keep it up. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 125 

There's a rule that will work. None otjher 
will that we know anything about. 

Mark: Though you're hkely to take that 
for a foolish theory, it isn't any such thing. It 
isn't a theory at all; it's nothing but a plain 
summing up of what we've seen going on 
around us in the last four years. I can't state 
that too emphatically. 

Anyway, we got some fine new neighbors 
that year, and many of them have stuck. 
They're still coming in; and slowly, year by 
year, we're changing the face of the land. 
Happy Hollow is no longer a hidden nook in a 
shaggy wilderness. The country is beginning 
to look like something. The work doesn't go 
swiftly. There have been no lightning-flashes 
of accomplishment. A bit at a time we're 
building up a fine, strong, happy community. 

There's a wide lawn spreading around our 
farmhouse — about three acres in smooth sward 
and three or four more in park formed by 
young trees that were saved from the first 
clearing — oak, elm, hackberry, hickory, per- 
simmon, wild cherry, black haw, walnut, locust. 
Specimens were left of every native tree we 
found in our jungle ; and here and there stands 
a close group of saplings bound together in 



126 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

their tops by matted wild grape vines, making 
little summer nooks. These house grounds 
have given us no end of delight in the making. 
We're working on them still, a little at a time. 
The real work began in that spring of 1910, 
after the first rough clearing was done. 

For many years this spot had been a dump- 
ing ground for all the refuse of the farm. 
Stone heaps were everywhere; and between 
were rusting and rotting piles of old cans and 
broken tools and all manner of junk. We had 
to clear all that away. There were tough old 
stumps to come out, too, and a litter of loose 
stone to be picked up. After that, with plow 
and scraper and harrow, we smoothed the land 
down, stopping between whiles to grub out a 
mess of roots or buck-brush or to pry up a huge 
bowlder. We've moved a train load of rubbish 
from this corner. It was back-breaking work 
— chopping, tugging, lifting, • conquering a 
square yard at a time, building the yards into 
square rods painfully. We worked without 
sympathy from our native neighbors. By that 
time most of them had given us up as hopeless 
imbeciles who were "wastin' money somethin' 
turrible." To do anything on a farm to any 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 127 

end but the most obvious utility wasn't justi- 
fied to their understanding. 

There was Jake. Jake lived on a rocky- 
little patch on the hillside back of Happy Hol- 
low — there were three generations of a multi- 
tudinous family in a squalid two-room shack 
set on stilts, with a couple of pigs sheltered 
beneath the floor. Jake was of the middle gen- 
eration. Though he had lived here all his life, 
almost under the shadow of the walls of the 
university, neither he nor any of his folks 
could read a word ; nor could any one of them, 
by any toilsome "figgerin'," discover how many- 
quarters and dimes and nickels went to make 
up a dollar. When he was paid for a day's 
work, he liked to have his money given him in 
one big, round coin. He knew what that was. 

Jake used to work for us at odd times, ac- 
cording to the philosophy of the neighborhood ; 
that is, he didn't want a steady job, but he 
learned to look upon our farm as a place where 
he might come for an occasional day's work in 
emergency, when his family would be "plumb 
out of meal." Whenever we saw him come 
moseying down the trail from his cabin we 
could tell at a distance infallibly whether he 
was coming as a laborer or to make us a 



128 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

friendly visit. So long as we knew him he 
wore only one suit of clothes. It must have 
been a cast-off when he moved into it; for to 
say that it bagged about his lean frame is to 
make a poverty-stricken use of words. There 
was extra room enough in his breeches for a 
couple of his children. In the course of the 
years that suit of his had become a fearful and 
wonderful thing in its tailoring — patches upon 
patches ; a great, rough square of gunny-sack- 
ing set upon the original cloth, and a triangle 
of faded blue denim on the bagging, and a 
ragged oval of old plaid shawl on the denim. 
Joseph's coat wasn't in it with Jake's pants. 
Every patch in the lot flapped picturesquely 
loose at one side or the other. The state of 
those flaps betrayed his state of mind beyond 
mistaking. If he came for work^ their edges 
would flutter free; but when he dressed for 
Sunday or in his favorite role of gentleman of 
leisure the flaps would be tucked in carefully. 
That sign never failed. Just so surely as we 
saw him come into the ofling looking like a 
yacht with all its bunting flying, we knew the 
formula for what was coming: 

"Ha-owd'y! You-uns all up ?" Which was 
a kindly inquiry as to the state of our health. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 129 

"Ha-owd'y, Jake! Yes, we-uns are all up. 
You-uns all up?" 

"Yes, we-uns all up." And then, after a 
decently dignified interval: *'I reckon I better 
be cuttin' you-all a little jag o' wood this 
mawnin'. We-all is needin' coffee." 

Jake could never sense the meaning of our 
work for beauty's sake around the house. He 
worked with us some times, doing what he was 
told in the rough preparation; but he never 
knew just what we were driving at. At the 
last, when the scraping and rolling were fin- 
ished and we began seeding our first acre with 
Dutch clover and bluegrass, he stood by in 
complete bewilderment. 

"Hit 'pears to me," he said, "like you-uns 
has done spent a heap o' money gittin' that 
little patch o' land fixed for plantin'. What 
fer a crop is that you-all are puttin' onto it?" 

"We're planting lawn, Jake," I tried to ex- 
plain. 

The word went clear past him. "Lawn," he 
echoed. "I 'most believe I've hearn tell about 
lawn, some'eres. What kind of a crop is it?" 

Even when he saw the finished work, smooth 
and green and fair, his understanding held 
aloof. "Hit looks to me like plumb waste," 



130 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

he criticized. "You-all's cattle could git a 
heap o' pickin' off that grass. Ain't you-uns 
goin' to use it fer nothin' at all?" 

Good old Jake! He's dead now. We've 
wondered what he thinks of the New Jerusa- 
lem, with all its flagrant exhibit of glories that 
the pigs and mules can't eat. 

We've kept steadily at work upon our house 
grounds through these years, grubbing, hack- 
ing, trimming, setting hedges and rose gar- 
dens, doing most of it with our own hands. 
We've never found anybody to work at that 
job comprehendingly. 

Our field work, though, went ahead in that 
year under full steam. Looking over the old 
fields after the spring plowing, when the effect 
of the last year's work could be judged, I had 
my first real thrill of satisfaction as a farmer. 
Even in a twelvemonth our handling of the 
soil, had told immeasurably. Instead of the 
tenant's three- or four-inch furrows, that did 
no more than break the surface into clods, we 
had turned six-inch furrows last year, and con- 
tinual timely harrowing and cultivating had 
put our soil into far better mechanical condi- 
tion than it had ever known. It wasn't as we 
wanted it yet, by a long shot ; but we had some- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 131 

thing to work upon by way of a foundation. 
The new spring plowing went eight inches 
deep, turning up a new layer of the subsoil. 
The harrows, both spike and spring-tooth, 
followed the plows forthwith, catching the clay 
at just the right time, working it well into the 
mass. New stone was brought to light with 
the deeper breaking. We hauled that off at 
once, and then flew at the fields with a heavy 
log drag, pulverizing the surface thoroughly 
and packing it into a firm bed so that it would 
hold the last drop of its gathered moisture. 
The tough old "plow-pan" was gone now; 
there was nothing to prevent free circulation 
of moisture. Since that time neither drought 
nor freshet has bothered us. When the heavy 
rains come, they sink deep, instead of running 
madly away down the slopes with our soil, 
leaving the surface guttered and torn; and if 
a drought strikes us, there's a deep reservoir 
to be drawn upon. 

On the several smaller patches left us by the 
tenant — those that were too small to let us use 
the cultivator to advantage — we planted small 
grain, oats and rye, to be cut as hay in May or 
early June, and to be followed at once with a 
thick sowing of cowpeas. Our first year of 



132 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

experience had converted me absolutely to the 
cowpea, though that experience had given me 
only the merest foretaste of its value. Now, 
after five years of use, I'm a cowpea radical. 
I'd let go of any other crop on our list before 
I'd abandon this. When our friend at the ex- 
periment station told us of it, we had made al- 
lowance for him as a zealous advocate, maybe 
a little shy on the judicial temperament; but 
we know now that he stopped short of the 
whole truth. It's hard to understand why the 
South has been so laggard in the use of this 
great little old plant. 

In our first year we had put cowpeas on 
every one of those smaller fields, broadcasting 
a bushel or more of seed to the acre, and cut- 
ting the vines for hay in August or early Sep- 
tember. That cutting gave us a ton and a 
half to the acre of cured hay equal in feeding 
value to the best alfalfa; in places, where we 
had been able to break deeply, the yield went 
to two and a half tons. When that crop was 
off, a strong second growth came on from the 
stubble. This was left upon the ground, and 
in the fall some of it was pastured and some 
turned under as green manure. 

There was magic in its effect upon the small 



t 




OUR FIRST CROP 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 133 

grains in the next season. Through years of 
careless use, the soil had been stripped of just 
about the last pennyweight of its available 
nitrogen, so that every leaf and blade that tried 
to grow upon the land looked bloodless — sick- 
lied o'er, you might say, with the pale cast of 
thoughtlessness. Our cowpeas had begun the 
work of restoration, catching free nitrogen out 
of the air and tucking it deep into the crannies 
and crevices. Our oats and rye came on in the 
next spring a thick coat of vivid green, vigor- 
ous and hearty, the straw twice as tall as it had 
stood the year we bought the place, and rich 
with broad, succulent leaves. Most of that 
change was to be credited to one good cropping 
with the cowpea. So, when the grain was cut, 
cured and hauled to the haymows, the land was 
broken again immediately, and then we har- 
rowed in a bushel and a half of cowpeas to the 
acre. On some of the patches the peas stood 
alone ; on one we mixed half a bushel of Ger- 
man millet with each bushel of peas, and on 
another half a bushel of amber sorghum, to 
see if the stiff straw and cane would support 
the vines and aid in the work of curing. We've 
stuck to that system. Sometimes, when the 
hay supply threatens to be short, we plant the 



134 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

peas as a main crop, seeding as early in the 
spring as the ground is thoroughly warmed up. 
Always we follow small grain with peas, no 
matter if the grain harvest is late; for, what- 
ever happens, we'll have a rich green crop to 
turn under. Always we drill peas between the 
corn-rows at the last cultivation, cutting and 
feeding the vines with the fodder after har- 
vest, or occasionally * 'topping" the corn-stalks 
for a fodder crop and pasturing young cattle 
on the stubble and pea-vines. The long and 
short of it is that we plant cowpeas wherever 
and whenever we have a vacant space on the 
land. I'm persuaded that, barring only the 
deep breaking and thorough cultivation, noth- 
ing else has served so well to build up our soil 
and our crop yields. 

In that second year our corn, too, showed 
the effect of the previous year's pea-planting. 
That corn was good to look upon on our one 
big field. We had bought good seed of a well- 
bred white dent type, planning to have this 
thoroughly acclimated to our conditions and to 
build it up from year to year by careful selec- 
tion. Its spring growth promised fulfillment 
of the seventy-five-bushel forecast given us at 
the experiment station. Not a hill was miss- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 135 

ing in the field. But when the grain formed 
we knew we should have to wait a while for our 
full yield — another year, or maybe two, till 
the new strain would have accommodated itself 
to its new surroundings. That was all right 
with me. It was plain that we would beat last 
year's yield, anyway. So we did, with a har- 
vest of a little more than forty bushels — more 
than three times the yield our tenant had got 
two years before. That was all satisfactory 
for the present. Most farmers in this country 
would have been content to let that record 
stand, considering everything; but after har- 
vest Sam and I had one of our talks about the 
years to come. 

"Sam," I said, "that's pretty good corn. 
The quality's away up yonder. But does it 
suit you?" 

Sam grinned. "I'm an awful hard man to 
suit, when it comes to growing corn," he said. 
"I've never been just to say suited yet." 

"Well, listen," I said. "They told me at the 
station that we can get seventy-five bushels on 
this land, if we know how to farm. We have 
over thirty bushels to go yet. Let's make it 
fifty, instead of thirty. Let's run it up to bet- 



136 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

ter than a hundred. Do you reckon we can 
doit?" 

Sam grinned again, with the frank delight 
he always shows in any sort of a challenge. 
"I'll go you!" he said. "We'll never quit till 
we've done it!" 

And that's the way it stood with us on the 
corn proposition after our second crop was 
gathered. We were undertaking to get nine 
times as much grain to the acre as the tenant 
had harvested! I wonder if the gods of sun 
and wind and rain didn't chuckle quietly as 
they harkened to that impudent defi of ours. 



VII 

As I read over this story, it strikes me that 
I may not have been quite fair in my record. 
I seem to have laid a very hght accent upon 
our difficulties, giving an effect as if we had 
had none that counted — as if we had followed 
a smooth and easy path that led straight from 
one success to another. To give that impres- 
sion is misleading* 

We had our difficulties, rough ones, plenty 
of them. Indeed, the whole job, from first to 
last, has been a conquest of difficulties. I can't 
remember a blessed thing we've done that 
hasn't given us hard work or anxious thought, 
or both. That was the only experience we had 
any right to expect. There were times when 
the frets came in flocks. Lazy incompetence 
of the extra labor we were forced to hire some- 
times in emergency was an unfailing source of 
irritation. At first we had marveled that we 
were able to get men to work for a dollar a day 
and "find" themselves — less than half the price 

137 



138 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

of day's labor in Nebraska; but the marvel 
swapped ends when we had tried out a dozen or 
so of these dollar-a-day men. In our six years 
we've had only two out of dozens who have 
earned their dollar fairly, measured by any 
standard of fairness you'd like to apply. 

One foggy autumn morning, when the farm 
was shrouded in white, Laura sent one of these 
chaps across the farm to the pasture, to drive 
up the cows for milking. He was gone for 
more than an hour. I was strong for waiting, 
just for the fun of seeing how long it would 
take him to get back; but that grew tedious 
after a while. When he was located, by and 
by, he was burrowed snugly back into a big 
shock of corn fodder, sitting on the ground 
and calmly chewing his snuff-stick. 

"I reckoned as how I'd be savin' time fer 
me an' the cow-critters, too," he argued, "if 
I'd wait till the fog riz." 

Maybe the logic of that was good enough; 
but we couldn't quite get used to haying our 
"hands" always sitting down at the farm work. 
If one would be set to picking stone, he'd head 
straightway for some sheltering hollow in the 
field where he might sit down out of sight; if 
we set him to clearing, he'd burrow forthwith 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 139 

into the thicket and sit down; if we sent a cou- 
ple into the woods with axes and crosscut saw, 
they'd sit madly all day long. A neighbor of 
ours, a newcomer, put the matter pretty well 
into words when he said that the prevalent 
disease here in the hills seemed to be the sitting 
sickness. 

We had trouble, too, with the newly cleared 
ground. Did you ever try to keep a ten-acre 
field "sprouted down" after you've hacked off 
a thick growth of sassafras and black-jack and 
post-oak and sumac and red elm? Well, you 
ought to try it. I've heard prairie farmers 
complain of the great hardship of making a 
crop on virgin sod; but that's just old cheese 
in comparison with cropping in a mess of green 
roots and grubs and sprouts. 

Talk about your hydra-headed monsters ! A 
common little old sassafras bush has any hydra 
in the zoo backed clear off the boards at that 
game ; and as for a spreading-rooted red elm or 
a thicket of sumac — oh, hush! Listen: You 
take your heavy hoe and go out on a warm day 
in spring, just when the blood of the earth has 
got well into circulation and the sprouts are 
booming, and you chop and chop and chop 
your way across the length of the field, leaving 



140 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

a clean six-foot swath behind you; and when 
you turn at the fence to look proudly back over 
what you've done, there the pesky things stand, 
four times as thick as when you started. If 
you think that's an exaggeration by way of a 
joke, come on down here and try it. 

"Why 'n't ye do yer sproutin' in dog days?" 
the hill people used to ask of us. "If ye git 
'em in the dark o' the moon in dog days, the 
sop'll sour, so's they won't come up no more." 

So we tried it in the dark of the moon in dog 
days, and they came up thicker than ever. 
We tried it on Washington's birthday, and 
Thanksgiving, and the Glorious Fourth, and 
every other day on the calendar ; and each time 
we tried it they came up thicker than ever. 
We'd get into a rage sometimes and try grub- 
bing them out by the roots; but that was a 
hopeless job. Do you know the story of the 
little boy who was annoyed by the roar of the 
ocean, and who set out to stop it by dipping 
up all the water in his little pail and pouring 
it out on the sand? Well, it was something 
very like that with our sprouting. The little 
boy's remedy for his distress was simplicity it- 
self. So was ours. All we had to do was to 
keep on chopping, and by and by there 



: HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 141 

wouldn't be any sprouts left. The virtue of 
the theory was perfectly obvious — but it 
wouldn't work. 

And then in a fateful hour we got hold of a 
government bulletin on the Angora goat. 
That bulletin went into my consciousness as 
summer rain soaks into a parched soil. There 
were pictures in the book, pictures of broad 
fields before and after — dense smudges of im- 
penetrable tangles before, and unimaginably 
fair, smooth expanses after. Angora goats 
had wrought that wondrous transformation. 
There was nothing to it: I just had to have a 
set of Angora goats. 

Well, I got 'em. It was in the fall of 1910 
that I met a man who owned an Angora goat 
ranch fifty miles back in the hills, across a cou- 
ple of counties. Why, sure, he'd let me have 
some, if I'd go over to the ranch and drive 
them across country. I might have twenty- 
five or thirty — ^more if I wanted them, for two 
dollars and fifty cents a head. I'd have to be 
satisfied with wethers, and I'd have to take 
them about half-and-half grades and full- 
bloods; but, man, dear, when I got them I'd 
certainly have something that would eat up the 
sprouts ! When he tried to tell me about that, 



142 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

my friend's speech just went trailing off into 
impotent stutterings. No, no, it wouldn't be 
any trouble to drive 'em over ; all we'd have to 
do would be to get 'em headed this way and 
keep 'em a-comin'. They ought to make the 
fifty miles over the woods trails in a couple of 
days. And when I got 'em here and turned 
'em onto a mess of sprouts, farming that land 
after a year or so would be nothing but one 
glad, sweet song. That's what the bulletin 
said, too. There was no doubting it. 

My boy and I went after our goats in No- 
vember, going in the saddle across the hills to 
Carroll County. Louis rode Dick, our big 
gray work-horse, and I had Jack, the big gray 
mule that was Dick's harness mate. Those two 
beasts were the Damon and Pythias of the 
farm; the mule's devotion to Dick was idola- 
trous ; in pasture or stable he clung to the horse 
like his shadow; he was quite unmanageable 
if they were a rod apart. That made a nice 
state of things for handling a bunch of goats 
in a wilderness of ragged, unfamiliar hill coun- 
try. 

Never mind the preliminaries. Our goats 
were delivered to us at the ranch gate in the 
gray dawn of a crisp morning. The first thing 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 143 

they did was to scatter to the four winds over 
a perpendicular hillside. We started off right 
and left to round them up, the mule plunged 
and kicked and trumpeted his melancholy re- 
monstrance — and that finished the scattera- 
tion. It was noon before we had them gath- 
ered. A couple of the kids were quite tired 
out, and we had to lift them and tie them in 
front of our saddles. While we were at that, 
the band redistributed itself. We've never 
seen them all together from that day to this. 

We spent a week in getting our goats to 
Happy Hollow, and turned into our sprout 
patch. That was when the glad, sweet song 
part began. We had fenced in the patch ac- 
cording to the ranchman's directions, with 
sixty-inch woven wire and a string of barbed 
wire atop. That would hold 'em, he had said. 
So it did, for a while — just while we were get- 
ting the gate shut behind them. By the time 
the latch clicked, every mother's son was stand- 
ing on top of a fence post, getting ready to 
jump. They've been jumping ever since. Oh, 
yes, we still have 'em; but I do certainly wish 
that somebody would come along and offer me 
something for them. If he ever does, he'll own 
some goats. 



144 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

You know what the old farmer said about 
the hog- tight fence: He said it was perfectly- 
easy to build one, but perfectly impossible to 
keep the hogs from getting through it. Well, 
there you are ! We Ve built fence that a giraffe 
couldn't see over, and it's never given our goats 
a single moment's pause. 

Eat sprouts? I'd like to know who started 
that story. They're fond of slippery elm when 
it's in just the right stage in the spring; it's 
quite good sport to watch them loosen a strip 
of the tender inner bark and then peel it 
smoothly off while the huskiest of the big 
grades straddles the sapling and bends it down. 
Also they like to nibble daintily at the sour 
berries of the sumac when they redden in late 
summer; and there are a few tidbits in leaves 
and buds they'll take if they're starved into it. 
But as for the real serious business of eating 
sprouts, that's a canard. They'll eat anything 
else first. They caught Sam's boy in the pas- 
ture once and ate his little blue gingham shirt 
off. A friend who visited us at Christmas 
was butted down in the lane and held prostrate 
while they ate up his necktie and the sprig of 
mistletoe he wore in his buttonhole. They'll 
fight for the privilege of eating a knot of dried 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 145 

cockleburs out of the brush of a cow's tail. 
The first shake out of the box after we brought 
the beasts home an angry neighbor had me in 
town before a justice of the peace because my 
goats had jumped the fence and eaten his 
young apple orchard clear down to the ground. 
Once, when they got out and wandered up to 
the house, they ate up most of a bundle of red- 
wood shingles. One of them ate the tail off a 
Leghorn cockerel that Laura meant to exhibit 
at the county fair; and another stole a sack of 
tobacco from my hip pocket and ate it up, bag 
and all. They ate all the bright red paint off 
the wheels of a brand-new farm wagon. But 
when it comes to staying decently in their pas- 
ture and eating sprouts, they simply aren't 
there. I've thought of hobbling them with ball 
and chain, but most likely it wouldn't do any 
good; they'd eat it off. I've read lately that 
some genius has invented a jumpless goat, but 
I don't believe it. That's one of the things 
that's too good to be true. 

Do I seem to be jesting? Believe me, I'm 
not jesting for the mere jest's sake. We've 
fallen into the way of getting a laugh when- 
ever we can out of our discomfitures, and I 
don't mind telhng you what we found to laugh 



146 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

about in that goat business; but my real pur- 
pose in referring to it is to point what it 
taught us. 

We bought our goats in the hope that we had 
found a short cut through a difficulty. First 
and last, the short cut has cost more in time and 
labor and money than we'd have spent in gain- 
ing the end by plain every-day hard work. I 
don't want to try drawing an infallible con- 
clusion for others to go by ; but that's the way 
we've been served every time we've essayed a 
short cut. We've just about made up our 
minds that successful short cuts in farming are 
a good deal like royal roads to learning: 
There aren't any. We've had thirty goats 
working for four years on a few acres of hill- 
side brush patch ; and this spring we're paying 
men to go over the land and clear up after the 
goats — paying as much as a good job with ax 
and grubbing-hoe would have cost in the first 
place. We've lost four years' use of the land 
as pasture, and we've spent unreckoned time 
worrying with the fences and the goats. 

We had only wethers, as I've told you. 
That's contrary to the policy we've settled 
upon for the farm ; excepting the mules we've 
really needed for the hardest work on the new 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 147 

ground, we haven't intended to keep any beast 
around the place that doesn't contribute some- 
thing through increase. When I haven't any- 
thing else in particular to do, though, I trem- 
ble to think of the fix we'd have been in if our 
goat herd had been multiplying on our hands 
through these years. 

Around the rim of the farm on three sides 
lies a border of higher land, just like the rim 
of a basin, sloping inward. For the most part 
this slope is too abrupt to permit of cultiva- 
tion ; the soil would wash too badly. That part 
has never been in use ; its unkempt appearance 
has made it always an eyesore. We wanted 
nothing of that sort inside our fence lines ; yet 
to keep up that twelve or fifteen acres for looks' 
sake only was a luxury we couldn't afford. 
We had natural leaning that way ; but we had 
to keep drawing the reins sharply upon our 
inclinations in such matters. The house 
grounds really gave us indulgence enough; as 
for the rest of the land, we were agreed that 
we must make every possible acre count for 
something. That encircling slope was quite 
worthless when we got the farm. For years 
the tenants had cut their firewood there; true 
to their habits they had taken the lazy way, 



148 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

leaving treetops and refuse scattered every- 
where to rot, so we had a lot of extra work in 
cleaning up the ground and trying to save the 
best of the young timber. Figuring out the 
use of that land, so that we might make it an 
asset instead of a liability, was one of our diffi- 
culties. The farmer who is working smooth 
prairie land or a good bit of valley, with its soil 
of a uniform type, has no problem of this sort ; 
but on a farm like ours, with conditions chang- 
ing at every fence, every field invites individual 
treatment. At first glance that may appear a 
nuisance, but there are compensations. If the 
farmer is inclined to be active instead of shift- 
less, a hill farm keeps him spurred up to doing 
his best. I think it's worth considering that 
throughout Arkansas the farmers who have 
bank accounts are found much oftener on the 
hill lands than on the rich, level alluvial lands 
where working conditions are much easier. I 
heard this remarked once, with emphasis, at a 
bankers' convention in the state. 

Our first concern with that ragged strip of 
land was to get it cleaned up so we could see 
what it looked like. We began on the worst 
part, cutting out the undergrowths and the 
worthless scrub, leaving some of the young tim- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 149 

ber that would have value some time. It has 
been a continual surprise to us to find what 
good stuff is smothered away in those thickets. 
When the farm came to us it had been all but 
denuded of mature and serviceable timber. 
The sawmill men had taken their pick of it in 
the earlier days, and the tenants had butchered 
the rest ruthlessly; about all we had left was 
fit only for firewood, beside the young growths 
struggling in the ruins for life. So that w^e 
need not blunder, we had studied with care 
some good bulletins and handbooks on farm 
forestry and the management of woodlots. 
Save on that first clearing our foresting hasn't 
gone far beyond the cleaning up stage, but it 
will be made one of the permanent features of 
our work. 

Out of that first thicket we saved scores of 
thrifty young post-oak trees — the straightest 
and best, for after-use in fencing. We kept 
also all the black locust we found, and all the 
cherry and black walnut, with here and there 
a shapely plume-topped elm. Where it did 
not crowd, we left the best of the young hick- 
ory, too, and the persimmon that was old 
enough to fruit. It will be years before that 
timber has coromercial value ; but it will all be 



150 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

♦ 

worth something some time. Its gain in value 
from year to year is paying a fair interest on 
our investment in the land. It would never 
have been worth a cent if we'd left it as it was. 

Once that rough cleaning up was done, we 
had ten acres that didn't look at all bad. It 
was rather steep and stony in spots, but there 
was a lot of good land in between. What to do 
with it was the next question. A German or 
an Italian would have set it straightway to 
vineyard ; slope and exposure and subsoil con- 
ditions were all exactly right for that use. But 
we weren't yet ready to attack commercial 
grape-growing. I mean to get to that before 
long ; one of the things in the back of my head 
is a plan for covering that hillside with Scup- 
pernong vines. Meanwhile, that ten acres 
ought to be doing something more than carry 
its young timber. 

The puzzle solved itself without definite in- 
tention of ours. We had been perplexed over 
permanent pasture. Experience had shown 
that the native grasses had almost no value for 
milk cattle ; those that grew in the denser woods 
were sparse and uncertain. As we had thought 
it over, we had decided against using our culti- 
vable land in made pastures or meadows. The 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 151 

length of our growing season — almost two 
hundred and twenty days between killing 
frosts in spring and fall — promised much 
better returns if we would use that land 
in the production of annual forage crops. 
Conditions did not fit the northern farmer's 
system of crop rotation, with clover and 
grass as important items. We could do bet- 
ter by double-cropping with small grains and 
cowpeas, filling in at odd times with catch 
crops of rape or sorghum or broad "succotash" 
mixtures to be pastured down. We were aim- 
ing at a system that would keep our cultivable 
fields in use to the fullest possible extent 
throughout the year, while allowing us to shift 
plans quickly at any time to suit changing 
seasonal conditions. Permanent pasture or 
meadow would be too inflexible to go well with 
such a system. 

Yet, with the best we could do in manage- 
ment, there would be times in the year when we 
would have no crop ready for feeding to ad- 
vantage. The use of the silo would settle that 
difficulty by and by; but for the present, de- 
spite our theory, good permanent pasture 
would fill some awkward gaps in spring and 
summer. 



152 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

Our clearing of the waste hillside helped us 
out. So soon as the clearing was done, at once 
the worthless wild grasses began to be replaced 
by other growths. Bluegrass appeared on the 
moist flats along the brook bottom ; and wher- 
ever the sunlight struck upon the unaccus- 
tomed ground, Japanese clover volunteered. 
Within a year it had formed a heavy mat, tak- 
ing firm foothold, crowding into every nook 
and cranny between the stones. Every beast 
on the farm took to it as a youngster takes to 
candy. It is one of the first of the spring 
growths, and it stands well into the fall ; in the 
sheltered places it persists even through the 
mild winters. The sprawling, pale-flowered 
buffalo clover came, too, some of the myriad- 
stemmed plants large enough to fill a washtub. 
Not much seems to be known about that clover ; 
it has had a minor place, as the germination 
of its seed is said to be uncertain; but it has 
taken a firm grip upon our hills. Our white 
Dutch clover on the lawn had thrived well, and 
this made its way little by little up the slope. 
The bur clovers appeared, and the common red, 
and some little patches of sweet clover, till we 
had a mixture we couldn't have beaten with any 
studied planting. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 153 

On one corner of the clearing we gave Ber- 
muda grass a lodgment, planting a few sack- 
fuls of root cuttings brought from the town- 
side of the mountains. There's the grass for 
you ! It is spreading and spreading ; wherever 
it's had a chance it has made a sward deep and 
thick and smooth as velvet. It knows nothing 
of discouragement or defeat; it's at its best 
right in the middle of a hot, dry summer, when 
almost every other pasture plant on the list has 
bowed its head and surrendered. Year by year 
it grows better and better; a five-year-old sod 
will carry more cattle to the acre and for a 
longer time than any other grass that grows. 
It seems a mighty pity that northern winters 
are too much for Bermuda. More than any 
other single factor, Bermuda grass promises to 
make the South into the great meat-producing 
section of the Union. Supplemented with any 
of the clovers, it makes perfect pasture for any 
growing animal. 

Native southern farmers have fought Ber- 
muda grass as a pest because, once it has estab- 
lished itself, it spreads and persists stubbornly. 
It bothers the southerner in his cornfields. But, 
if the farmers only knew it, there's more real 
money to be made in the careful grazing of an 



154 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

acre of good Bermuda grass than the average 
southern acre of corn is worth. 

Our rather aimless first work on that hillside 
taught us something. The poverty of the so- 
called pastures hereabouts isn't the inevitable 
logic of natural conditions; it's chargeable to 
the farmers themselves. The roughest of these 
hill lands, which are habitually left as ugly 
wastes, may be converted to profitable use at 
small cost. We couldn't make a better pas- 
ture than the one Nature made for us immedi- 
ately we gave her a fighting chance. If there's 
one complaint more often heard than another 
among the farmers here it is that they can't 
afford to keep "milk stock" that must be given 
"boughten feed" all the year round. With a 
pasture like ours for the summer, and cowpea 
hay carrying a good crop of matured pods for 
winter feeding, besides an acre or two of fall- 
seeded mixed small grains and rape for winter 
pasturing, milk and butter may be had here all 
the time at as little cost as anywhere on the 
map. It just isn't done; that's all. At this 
time, late in May, our cows are in fine milk 
and sleek as pet rabbits ; but they haven't had 
an ounce of grain in the last two months save 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 155 

an occasional "lick" of bran given them for 
friendship's sake. 

Our world-without-end hacking and chop- 
ping and grubbing at thicket and bush and 
sprout has been hard enough, goodness knows. 
Sam says he has the habit so firmly fixed now 
that he's going to be miserable when there's no 
more of that sort of thing to do. Once we'd 
set our minds to the job of cleaning up the 
place and wouldn't relinquish it, we got good 
out of it. We were taught the merit of keep- 
ing everlastingly at it, which is the very rock- 
bottom of successful farming; and we were 
taught, too, that despite its forbidding first 
appearance, we could set every acre of our 
farm at work if we would. We needn't submit 
to the waste of a square rod unless we chose. 

There were other difficulties. Many things 
were to be done on the farm that called for 
machinery of price. We could have used ma- 
chinery to great advantage many times; but 
we couldn't afford all at once the investment 
that would have been necessary. There's noth- 
ing like having the right tool for doing hard 
work. A cheerful temper helps some in get- 
ting along without ; but there are the aches and 
the blisters ! 



156 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

The worst part of our work would have been 
a sight easier if we'd had a good stump puller ; 
but I didn't feel justified in putting the money 
into it when we should need it for only a few 
months at most. There was no chance of bu}^- 
ing a puller by clubbing with the neighbors; 
they had found it cheaper to let their stumps 
rot out. We wrestled with those rough old 
citizens of the field by main strength for a 
while, trying this way and that — burning some, 
and splitting out some with dynamite, and go- 
ing after some with the ax. By and by we 
found an expedient — not a lazy man's make- 
shift, mind you; there's a lot of difference be- 
tween the two. We cut a long, strong white 
oak sapling with an eight-inch butt and bound 
the butt end against a stump with trace-chains ; 
then hitched our work team to the outer end of 
the sapling, and started them to moving in a 
(jircle. That twist must have uprooted a moun- 
tain. It brought our stump out clean. 

We found other expedients that helped us 
through other difficulties. Some of them were 
a little clumsy, maybe; but we don't hesitate 
to use one of them on occasion just on that 
account, if only they lighten labor and actually 
cut down expense. Some of the men who have 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 157 

begun farming near us in the later years 
haven't been hampered for money to spend on 
equipment — and they've spent it ! It beats all 
how much good money may be tied up in one 
way and another when labor-saving becomes 
an obsession. I'm rather glad we haven't had 
all we might have liked to spend. We've 
gotten along just as well, and we've learned 
the worth of contriving. 

We're agreed on one fixed rule, though, Sam 
and I: No mere lazy makeshift "goes." 



VIII 

In our six years on the farm we have sold 
just next to nothing at all in the way of field 
crops. Last fall, for the first time, we sent a 
little surplus wheat to market — a hundred and 
fifty bushels; and at the same time we let a 
neighbor have a ton of baled wheat straw be- 
cause he needed it. That's absolutely all that's 
gone away from our land as raw material. 
Not a bushel of corn nor a pound of hay has 
gone out of our gates; on the contrary, we've 
bought corn and oats in the neighborhood, and 
tons of bran and shorts and other milled feeds. 
We've bought and fed these feeds to cattle 
and hogs sometimes when a prudent farmer 
of the old school could easily have figured that 
we were feeding at a considerable net loss. A 
bookkeeper could have proved it to us without 
half trying. Nevertheless we kept it up; and 
if you had been watching the farm as a whole, 
as we've watched it, I think you could be con- 
vinced that we've come out ahead on it. 

158 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 159 

If at the beginning of our work the farm 
had been in condition for the production of 
maximum crops of the field staples, we 
wouldn't have grown such crops for direct sale. 
Although we had no practical experience to 
guide us, years of study of the farming history 
of the northern prairie country had taught us 
one point in farm policy, a point we might not 
have learned in centuries of personal experi- 
ence on any particular farm. 

We had lived in Nebraska through the time 
when her farmers and the farmers of all the 
states around were grain-growers, producing 
grains for market. We had been right on the 
ground while those farmers as individuals and 
in communities, by counties and whole com- 
monwealths, had grown poorer and poorer 
year by year at that business. We had seen 
wide districts, each an empire in itself, loaded 
with accumulating debt, mortgaged to the 
limit, and then abandoned. There was just 
one good reason. The farmers gave many, but 
they all came to the same thing in the end: 
Grain-growing couldn't be made to pay. And 
by the same token, growing grain for market, 
on the average showing made by all the farms 
of the United States, doesn't pay to-day. It 



160 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

never has paid. Oh, of course, you may pick 
out individual farmers who have fared pretty 
well at it under exceptional conditions, and you 
may find records of exceptional years when 
whole neighborhoods of grain farmers have 
had a taste of prosperity. But I'm talking 
about average returns the country over, taking 
one year with another. For the average 
farmer, under average conditions, to persist in 
the business of producing and selling from his 
farm the grains and the common staples of the 
soil is to sink steadily into poverty until pov- 
erty engulfs him. If the farmers of a com- 
munity unite in that practice, the community 
is impoverished and by and by abandoned for 
virgin fields. 

That's perfectly good history, and there's 
perfectly good logic in it. Let's not bother too 
much with the statistics. Since I've been farm- 
ing, just for my own satisfaction I've dug out 
and analyzed the figures covering the produc- 
tion of the staple crops in all the states since 
the beginning of official records. Barring some 
occasional fluctuations which are unimportant 
in proportion to the whole mass, the story of 
all these crops shows pretty much of a same- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 161 

ness. Just by way of an illustration, corn will 
serve about as well as any of the lot. 

For the years from 1866 to 1910, the corn 
crop of the United States has had an average 
farm value per acre on December first of each 
year of eleven dollars. That takes the lean 
years with the fat ones, the districts of low 
prices with those of top prices. Only eleven 
dollars an acre, on an average, over a period 
of forty-five years! You'll agree there's not 
much guesswork in saying that during those 
forty-five years the average cost of plowing, 
harrowing, planting, cultivating and harvest- 
ing an acre of corn, together with the items 
of seed, interest, taxes, depreciation of ma- 
chinery, and such-like, amounted to more 
than any man's eleven dollars. And that 
list of costs includes only fixed charges; it 
takes no account of extraordinary items of any 
sort. There's no getting away from the propo- 
sition that in those forty-five years of corn- 
growing the average farmer suffered a net loss 
on every acre of corn grown and sold from his 
farm. That's just another way of saying that 
the total crop of those forty-five years brought 
the farmers less than it cost them to produce it. 

There's just one thing that's kept all those 



162 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

farmers at work through all those years grow- 
ing all that corn; and that's the happy-go- 
lucky way they have of keeping no accounts 
with their business, so that they never know 
how they stand in a profit and loss reckoning 
with any crop. When the experts publish 
their estimates, along in the fall, it's so very 
easy to say: "My, but we're prosperous this 
year! The farmers have raised $10,000,000,000 
worth of stuff!" But what of it? That's only 
about $800 apiece for the farmers ; and out of 
that they must pay the whole year's cost of 
running their business. A bumper wheat crop 
is needed every year for paying interest on the 
farmers' debts — not the profit on that crop, 
mind you, but the gross price. The cost of 
producing that wheat the farmers have to pay 
in some other way. A bumper corn crop, sold 
at average farm price, gives the farmers of the 
nation only $100 a head in gross returns. The 
magnificence of totals that run up into billions 
may be mighty misleading. 

I'm not setting out to be cheerless in telling 
the farmer's story in this way; I'm just trying 
to tell you how our minds worked in figuring 
out our theory for the management of our own 
farm. As I've said before, we had it settled 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 163 

that we didn't want to farm unless we felt 
pretty sure that we could beat average farm- 
ing. 

We had lived through some years in Ne- 
braska that were a lot worse than the averages 
I've written of — years when the corn growers 
got no more than twelve or fifteen cents a 
bushel for their grain at harvest; when the 
product of an acre would bring only three dol- 
lars or less. Some of them sold for what they 
could get; others let their crops rot on the 
ground rather than fool with harvesting and 
marketing. They made more money out of 
their corn in the long run than those who sold. 
There's the point I'm trying to get at. There's 
an item in the economy of corn farming that's 
been left out of the farmers' reckoning through 
all the years. 

The farmers of those days — and that's only 
twenty years ago — who let their corn go off 
their farms for fifteen cents a bushel would 
have done better if they had turned cattle into 
their fields to eat up the crop at harvest — and 
then given the cattle away for nothing. 

Every bushel of corn that's hauled away 
from the land that grew it takes with it fifteen 
cents in fertility value. If you're feeding that 



164 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

corn to livestock and taking care of all manure, 
to be returned to the land, you're saving most 
of that fifteen cents. If you're not putting it 
back that way, sooner or later you'll have to 
put it back in some other and most likely a 
more expensive way. 

So, if you're feeding forty-cent corn to 
growing hogs or cattle, and saving fifteen cents 
out of that to go back to your land as ferti- 
lizer, that part of the grain that's making the 
gain in weight of your animals is costing only 
twenty-five cents. 

To put it another way: If you're selling a 
fifty-bushel crop of corn to a neighbor, you're 
giving him $7.50 that you're not figuring on; 
and if you're buying the fifty bushels from him 
to be fed to your own cattle and hogs, you'll 
get that $7.50 for the enrichment of your land, 
besides the profit you make in feeding. 

Now suppose that's kept up for ten years. 
Suppose you've raised fifty bushels of corn to 
the acre for that time and have sold it at har- 
vest. There's a total of $75 an acre that your 
land has lost in fertility. There's no three- 
shell trickery about it, either; it's clean gone, 
and it's gone to stay. Perhaps you haven't 
missed it yet; it may be that your methods of 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 165 

handling your soil, with deep plowing and good 
cultivation, have made available each year a 
new supply of nitrogen and potash and phos- 
phorus, so that you've been able to take off 
fifty bushels of corn to the acre right along. 
You may do it for a few years more. But you 
can't keep it up indefinitely, not on the richest 
soil outdoors. Take away fifty bushels of corn 
from an acre of land every year, with nothing 
put back to take the place of that fertility, and 
the time's coming when, no matter how good a 
farmer you are nor how good your land was to 
start with, you can't do it any longer. There's 
the whole story of the "worn out farms" that 
everybody's talking about. 

Liming a failing soil may put off the evil 
day. But lime doesn't give you new nitrogen 
and potash and phosphorus ; it merely helps in 
* 'breaking down" some of the combinations al- 
ready in the soil. The day will come when lim- 
ing won't help any more. Crop rotation, too, 
may postpone the reckoning, particularly if 
you're using the nitrogen storers in your ro- 
tation; but what about the potash and the 
phosphorus ? The long and short of it is that, 
no matter what your rotation, if you're grow- 
ing crops and selling them all away from your 



166 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

land, one of these times you'll have to change 
your system or take your place in the ranks 
with all the rest of the careless farmers who 
have played that careless game in that same 
careless way. 

It's plainer if we stick to corn for the illus- 
tration. The plain English and the plain logic 
of it is that if you've been growing corn per- 
sistently on your fields and selling it away, 
you'll certainly have to put back that fertility 
some time ; and if you put it back as commer- 
cial fertilizer, it will cost you fifteen cents or 
better to provide what a bushel of corn will 
take off. Besides, you'll not be able to make 
your soil as good as it was by using commercial 
fertilizer; to do that, you'll have to change its 
physical character. Feeding it chemicals won't 
do it. 

I seem to be trying to talk like a textbook, 
making a lot of argument about a theory. I 
shouldn't be doing that if the theory didn't 
apply so perfectly, and illustrate itself so thor- 
oughly by the past, present and future of our 
own farm. Ours was an infertile farm when 
we got it simply because the old practices had 
been followed in handling it for so long. 

Up in the prairie country we had seen farm- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 167 

ing "come back" when conditions changed so 
as to give the farmers handy and profitable 
markets for Hvestock, and when hogs and cat- 
tle were put upon the farms to eat the crops 
there. That was the beginning of prosperity ; 
prosperity could continue only upon that basis ; 
and only those might share in it who adopted 
the new practice. Just about the best feature 
of it was that the farmers who were feeding 
livestock on their land and carefully putting 
back the manure were providing a reserve fund 
of prosperity whose value was all too little 
known. Not many of them had taken the 
proposition apart, wheel and spindle and screw, 
to see just how it worked; so they were still 
blundering a little ; but even at that they were 
blundering along in the right direction. 

Remembrance of that prairie farm drama, 
as we had seen it, gave us plenty to think about 
in planning our scheme here. The more we 
thought it over, the more it appeared that 
farming simply isn't and simply can't be made 
a business of one year's crop-growing alone, 
nor of the crop-growing of any number of un- 
related years. That way lies failure. Through 
the interlocking years of the life of the farm 
there must run an uninterrupted, constructive 



168 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

idea. The science of farming isn't merely a 
hodge-podge of detached facts ; it's a big idea, 
with the facts grouped around it. The indi- 
vidual farm, if it's to succeed, must have some- 
thing of that form. Why, you might just as 
well pile up a lot of bricks hit-or-miss and ex- 
pect to get a finished piece of architecture as to 
stick to the old scrappy way of "working the 
land" and expect to build a successful farm. 

Our concern was to build a farm, to make a 
farm that would grow richer and better and 
more fruitful year after year. It would not 
satisfy us merely to haul fertility upon the 
land and distribute it around. We would do 
that, of course, as one of the means to our end, 
whenever it could be done to advantage in 
hastening the work of putting our fields in 
condition for cropping; but to rely upon out- 
side sources of fertility was too crude to serve 
as anything more than a temporary aid. If 
the success of our farm must depend upon the 
use of manure taken from our neighbors who 
ought to be using it upon their own land, and 
whose farms would be running down because 
of their failure to use it, then farming as a 
whole would show itself vitally weak. Do you 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 169 

see the point I'm trying to get at? Well, let 
me put it in another way. 

We had a badly run-down farm. With no 
great stretch of imagination you might liken it 
to a man whose constitution had been under- 
mined, his vitality left at low ebb, by dissipa- 
tion, or overwork, or disease, or anything you 
like. A man in that case might be helped over 
an acute attack of the Trembling Willies by a 
drastic use of drugs; but if he's ever to be a 
real man again, with the constitution and use- 
fulness of a man, that constitution must be 
built up from within. The functioning of his 
own organism must do the trick in really get- 
ting him back to normal. 

That's exactly how we looked at our prob- 
lem on this farm. If there was any help for 
the present and any hope for the future in the 
new scientific farming, we must be able to 
build this farm up from within, provided we 
could hit upon the right methods. 

Those methods, if they were right, must be 
simple, practical, reasonable; and they must 
render it possible to build up the farm to the 
point where it would begin to return a fair 
measure of profit upon investment and opera- 
tion without too great an outlay of time and 



170 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

money. That is to say, we must be able to get 
a "going" business under conditions and at a 
cost that would be justified under ordinary 
sensible business principles. Anybody could 
get the results we wanted by an unlimited use 
of money. That would be a job for a wealthy 
amateur bent upon a demonstration. Any- 
body might get the results eventually after a 
lot of experimenting with this way and that, 
watching for mistakes and correcting them as 
their effects cropped up. That would be a job 
for a man who had retired from active life and 
had taken to farming as an interesting way of 
killing time. But to get good results with 
minimum outlay of time and money — that was 
what we were after. 

Now I swear I'm done with argument about 
the theoretical end of the matter. I wanted to 
sum up the problem for you as we faced it after 
a couple of years of work on the farm, when 
the first rough jobs were pretty well done, 
when our land was in condition to begin real 
production, and when we had had time to get 
ourselves past the green stage and were able 
to think like farmers. 

Here's the answer we gave to ourselves for 
our problem, boiled down to the last word : 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 171 

We would use thorough methods of han- 
dling the soil, as a matter of course, in plowing 
and cultivation, so that the texture of the soil 
would be improved by every mechanical means 
consistent with sound economy. 

We would adopt a system of cropping and 
of crop rotation making the fullest possible 
use of those plants which store in the soil free 
nitrogen gathered from the air. These plants 
with their fine root systems would be of great 
aid in improving the soil's texture, and they 
would give us in abundance and at low cost 
that element of plant food which is the most 
expensive of all if bought in commercial forms. 

So far as possible every cultivable square 
rod of the farm would be kept at work pro- 
ducing something at all times of the year. 
Here was a departure from good farming as 
we had seen it practiced in the North. Our 
milder winters compelled a change if we would 
make the most of conditions. Instead of hard, 
prolonged freezes and heavy snows that would 
lie for days or weeks, we would have light 
freezes with long, mild intervals, and our win- 
ter moisture would fall more often as rain than 
snow. Fall plowing and winter fallowing 
would only subject the fields to wash, with no 



172 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

compensation. We would practice fall plow- 
ing only when the fields would carry a winter 
cover-crop of some sort — small grain, or rape, 
or winter vetch, to be pastured in winter or 
cut in the spring. 

So far as possible, every blade and stem of 
everything grown on the land, even the weeds, 
would be turned to account — fed to livestock 
on the place, or returned to the soil for humus. 
We've had brush fires at Happy Hollow on 
our newly cleared land ; but in all our six years 
no man has seen a wisp of anything burned 
that might be plowed under. But, oh, the fires 
we've seen on the lands up and down the val- 
ley! I wish I had the money they've cost the 
farmers since we've been here. 

To the uttermost of our ability, everything 
needed on the farm for food of man and beast 
would be produced here. If at any time the 
field crops of hay or forage or grain would 
show a surplus above the year's needs of the 
farm, new stock would be bought to consume 
this surplus — hogs or young milk cattle by 
choice. 

And then, for the ultimate rule toward 
which all the others tended, nothing would 
leave the farm save in the most finished form 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 173 

we could give it. That means that we would 
sell nothing but farm-fed animals or animal 
products. To the limit, every direct product 
of the soil and every by-product of our feeding 
would remain strictly at home. 

There, we said, was a working plan that 
ought really to work. It took us two good 
years to evolve it, to convince ourselves that it 
was right, that it was consistent with good 
sense and with itself, and that in our particular 
case, considering everything, it gave fair rea- 
son to expect success. We weren't doubtful 
of success, you understand; we were bound 
we'd succeed with the farm somehow ; the open 
question had been whether this plan was the 
best we could fix upon for insuring success. 

I think we had done mighty well through 
those first two years in not running foul of any 
of those rainbow enthusiasms — you can hardly 
call them ideas — which so often allure the in- 
experienced townsman upon finding himself 
suddenly possessed of a bit of land. You 
know what I mean — the visions of quick and 
vast riches to be achieved on a fraction of an 
acre devoted to growing zim-zim, or go-goo, or 
some other of those marvels of the soil. We 
hadn't been even tempted that way. 



174 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

Once, in my newspaper days, I had been as- 
signed to write a series of spring-time articles 
that would relate the happy experiences of 
some of our townsmen who had made good 
with such ventures — stories of back-yard cor- 
ners that had made neat little fortunes. The 
stories ought to be crisp and snappy, and they 
must be literally true. My editor thought it 
would be pretty clever to spring such a series. 
Folks would be surprised, not to say startled, 
to discover that such things were going on un- 
suspected under their very noses. 

So they might have been, if only we could 
have found the material. I spent two weeks 
looking for it. I found plenty of people who 
had had the vision; I found any number who 
had loaded up with the enticing literature of 
these bonanzas; I found scores who would 
shamefacedly admit having started a mush- 
room bed in the cellar, or a ginseng patch out 
beside the barn, or a planting of patent per- 
petual-motion strawberries, or a garden of 
high-priced herbs, or something or other; but 
I couldn't discover a soul who had been able 
to make any one of these ventures pay back 
even the money it had cost him to start. Re- 
luctantly we gave up that series. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 175 

"Well, then," my editor said, "let's get some- 
thing a little different. Get some stories about 
some of the farmers around here who have 
made big, quick money at farming. Some- 
thing splashy and stunning and romantic — 
that's what I want. Go to it!" 

So I went to it; but I couldn't find a single, 
solitary story of that sort, either, though I dug 
and dug and dug. I found well-to-do farmers 
enough, and some who were comfortably rich; 
but the only story they could give me was one 
of patient, persevering thrift, of difficulties 
mastered by hard thinking and hard work and 
— patience; always patience. 

My editor abandoned his project, but that 
experience stayed in my memory. I'm inclined 
to believe it was that experience quite as much 
as any native good judgment that restrained 
me from attempting to do impossible things or 
expecting impossibly quick results. 

But I avow and shall maintain it was good 
judgment that kept our energies concentrated 
upon one central and definite plan of opera- 
tion instead of scattered over many and vari- 
ous ventures in quest of early cash income. 

For instance, there's potato growing. 
There's nothing visionary about the potato. 



176 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

Potato farming is solid and sound as a busi- 
ness. In this hill country there are potato 
specialists who have made good money on this 
one product, year in and year out. We might 
have justified ourselves easily in planting five 
or ten acres to potatoes as a revenue producer. 
But we didn't. We have contented ourselves 
with growing potatoes for farm use and no 
more. 

And there's the strawberry. This is quite a 
strawberry country, and the growers who have 
gone about it right have found strawberry 
growing quite profitable. We might quite 
sanely have decided to cast an anchor to wind- 
ward by setting out a few acres of berries. But 
we didn't. With all the fruits we have held 
ourselves down to just enough for home con- 
sumption. 

There's some land on the farm well suited to 
celery. Well handled, that's a profitable crop, 
too. So is duck-raising profitable if one goes 
at it in the right way ; so is tomato-growing ; so 
is flower culture. There are dozens of things 
that promise and actually deliver profits to the 
farmer who puts his mind to them. We might, 
without being a speck visionary, have tried half 
a dozen of these things all at once, on the theory 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 177 

that we'd be likely to make something out of 
two or three of them anyway. That seems like 
a prudent line of conduct, doesn't it? But we 
didn't tackle any special product on a com- 
mercial scale. Looking back over these years, 
I'm certainly glad we didn't. 

And why? Because, once we had started on 
such a program, before we knew it we'd have 
found ourselves all "balled up" with a number 
of wholly unrelated projects, each one calling 
for special knowledge, special equipment, spe- 
cial care, and each carrying, beside its promise 
of possible profit, its own private and particu- 
lar veiled threat of loss. The inexperienced 
man who plunges on any specialty usually 
must pocket losses instead of profit while he's 
getting experience. The production of any 
perishable crop in quantity for market calls 
for skill in growing, and also it demands keen 
attention to marketing. We have known many 
an enthusiastic beginner to be overwhelmed 
and utterly discouraged by having on his hands 
a big perishable crop he didn't know how to 
dispose of. 

We don't intend always to leave such crops 
out of our reckoning. Sure as shooting, before 
long I'll start my vineyard of fancy table 



178 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

grapes; and so soon as we have some of our 
land in perfect condition for it I shall under- 
take the production of fancy potatoes for high- 
class hotel trade. There are two or three other 
things I'd like to try on a commercial scale 
by and by. But those will be projects stand- 
ing each on its own bottom; and before I'm 
committed to any one of them I'll make sure 
of the marketing end of the business. 

We didn't want our farming in its earlier 
years to consist of a mixed lot of side-lines, 
each independent of all the others. That is, we 
didn't want the responsibility of managing 
half a dozen farms until we had found out how 
to manage one successfully. So we decided 
to stick to our stock farming; and until we 
would get that firmly established we would not 
undertake the production of any crop not di- 
rectly and intimately related to the central 
idea of stock-growing. We saved confusion. 
We lived in no fear of wastes through having 
unsalable products on our hands; for every- 
thing we grew would be staple at all times even 
if we were not able to feed it all to animals on 
the farm. Of great importance, stock farming 
gave us a year practically free of periods of 
high excitement and extraordinary demands 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 179 

for labor and such-like. At Happy Hollow 
we have been able to keep men and teams stead- 
ily at work the year round, with no dull in- 
tervals of idleness, and with only occasionally 
a need for extra "hands." 

Best of all, though, stock farming enabled 
us to do exactly what we had set out to do — 
to build up the farm from within itself, to re- 
store its wasted vitality, to make its fertility 
certainly and perpetually self -renewing. 



IX 



Once we had as a guest the junior editor of 
one of the foremost farm journals of the coun- 
try — a most dehghtful chap, alive with en- 
thusiasm; and learned, too, in the science of 
farming. He knew the literature of the new 
farming from A to Izzard. In my talk with 
him I picked up no end of good, solid, meaty 
information; formulae, and field methods, and 
suggestions about low-cost balanced rations for 
growing pigs, and — oh, all sorts of clever 
'wrinkles." I thought a great deal of him and 
of his practical sense of things. 

The first evening he was with us we had for 
dinner green sweet peppers, stuffed with some- 
thing and baked. You know how good they 
are! Our friend liked them; he ate a second 
and a third with his cloved baked ham. 

"Fine!" he said. "You didn't know it, of 
course; but you couldn't have done me a 
greater kindness than by having these peppers. 

180 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 181 

I'm very, very fond of them. But how do you 
get them, away out here?" 

Laura pointed to the garden that lay just 
outside the dining-room window. "We merely 
go out and pick them," she said. 

"Not — not here?" he questioned. "You 
don't mean to say that you grow them your- 
selves !" 

Nothing would do but that he must leave the 
table, right in the middle of dinner, and go out 
to the garden to take a look at those peppers 
growing. It wasn't "put on," either; he was 
genuinely interested as he knelt to study the 
luxuriant plants laden with their waxy-green 
pods. 

"It's ridiculous!" he said. "Why, I've al- 
ways thought the pepper something exotic — 
tropical — I don't know. I pay enough for one 
when I have it on my hotel table at home. And 
to think you can have all you want, grown right 
here beside your house! But it isn't done 
much, is it?" He was quite a little "bashed" 
by the discovery. His mind kept coming back 
to it again and again. After dinner, while we 
smoked, he spoke without the embarrassment 
he had shown at first. 

"I ought to have known better, of course, in 



182 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

my place. That was an inexcusable lapse. 
But I'm not alone. We're all guilty of vast 
ignorance about the commonest things; the 
commoner and more familiar they are, the less 
we know about them. It's taken us ages even 
to observe some of the simplest phenomena, to 
say nothing of trying to understand them. 
For all our smartness, we're terribly ignorant." 

I guess he was dead right about that, though 
he'd been wrong in his notion about the pep- 
pers. I've told you that little story, not for 
the sake of poking fun at him for his mistake, 
but because his afterthought makes such a 
bully statement of the sum of our own experi- 
ence in ignorance. It's very curious 

Wait a minute, though! While I'm telling 
jokes on the professionals, there's another one 
I must tell. If I don't tell it now, I'm liable 
to forget it and leave it out altogether, which 
would be a pity. 

There used to be a "boss doctor" in the coun- 
try here. He wasn't a veterinarian ; he wouldn't 
have known what that meant. He was just a 
"boss doctor" whose knowledge of his work 
had been "picked up," a little here and a little 
there and not too much anywhere. He man- 
aged to get along pretty well with the general 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 183 

run of spavins and ringbones and "hollow- 
tail," taking in a dollar or two now and then, 
and getting some of his pay from the farmers 
in trade. No, he didn't do a land-office busi- 
ness ; but it beat working, anyway. 

Well, one day a farmer friend of ours had 
an old horse fall sick — genuinely sick. As the 
"boss doctor" happened to be the only man 
handy who might be able to help, he was called. 
The case troubled him. By the time he got 
there, the poor beast was down and out; he 
was all in; he was gone up — that is to say, he 
looked sort of scattered, which is a bad sign. 
The doctor couldn't make out what was the 
matter. 

"Ef he was only swole up some," he said, 
"it might be the colic. But he ain't. Nor there 
ain't nothin' the matter with his feet. I've saw 
'em ga'nted up like that with the milk- fever; 
only this is a geldin'. I don't b'lieve I can 
make out what's ailin' him. You might try 
rubbin' him with turkentime; sometimes that 
pearts 'em up a little. If he was mine, I 
reckon I'd jest wait an' see how he gits." 

They met in town a few days later. "Oh, 
say, Mister!" the "boss doctor" said. "I b'lieve 



184 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

I know now what's the matter with that hoss 
of your'n." 

"Yes," the farmer returned grimly, "so do 
I know what's the matter with him noWi He's 
dead." 

"No, but Hsten!" the doctor urged. "I run 
acrost a picture in the almanac that it said had 
that same kind of a complaint. I don't know 
how you'd pronounce it, but the way it was 
spelled was d-e-b-i-1-i-t-y — de-bil-^z-ty, I guess 
you'd call it. I'm tol'able sure that's what 
ailed him!" 

That struck us as funny when we heard it; 
but it's not a speck funnier than many and 
many a "break" we made in getting acquainted 
with the land. It's just everlastingly interest- 
ing to me to discover how stone blind a man 
may be in his mind who has gone through life 
with his two eyes open. Wasn't it Ruskin 
who remarked that the gift of understanding 
sight is the rarest of all — rarer even than abil- 
ity to think? There's a lot in that. After the 
experience of these years, I'd be willing to bet 
money, marbles or chalk that I could take any 
farmer I know into his own yard, only a couple 
of rods from his own door, and lose him com- 
pletely in a maze of familiar things. Just to 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 185 

show you what I mean: IVe asked a score or 
more of commercial orchardists hereabouts if 
they could tell me offhand how many petals an 
apple blossom has, and they've guessed all the 
way from four to a dozen. I've talked with 
farmers who couldn't say for sure whether a 
cow's hoof is split or entire. I've talked with 
farmers who simply didn't know how a pea- 
pod is attached to the vine. I've talked with 
farmers who had been looking pigs in the face 
all their lives but who couldn't tell to save them 
how a pig's snout appears from the front. 
Extreme cases? No, they're not. You try it 
on the next farmer you meet. Ask him 
whether the germ side of a kernel of corn on 
the ear lies toward the tip or the butt. Ask 
him to tell you, in feet and inches, about how 
long a horse's head is from the base of its ears 
to its nostrils. Show him a fake picture of a 
potato plant in bloom and ask him to tell you 
what's wrong with it. Let me tell you, you 
have some surprises in store for you if you're 
expecting accuracy. 

What kept bothering me for two or three 
years was the feeling of strangeness out of 
doors under the unfamiliar conditions. Inas- 
much as this is meant to be a perfectly honest 



186 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

story, I might as M^ell tell you honestly that it 
was right here at Happy Hollow I first 
learned to know fear — real Simon-pure, primi- 
tive animal fear. You've felt it, most likely, at 
one time or another. I felt it more than once 
when I began to wander around over the farm 
and through the woods on dark nights. Silly? 
Why, of course it was silly; but that doesn't 
change the fact. In my newspaper days I'd 
had all sorts of face-to- face encounters with 
fire and flood and disaster, earthquake and 
wreck and sudden death, and the worst of it 
all had never sent a quiver of personal fear 
through me. I don't pretend to understand 
the psychology of it. Maybe it was because 
there was always "something doing" to keep 
the mind busy — action, and excitement, and 
bright lights, and such-like. But it was 
mighty different when it came to taking a foot- 
trail across the farm and over the mountain on 
a still, dark night, alone. There's no wild 
creature in our country bigger than a 'coon or 
a red fox; but there were such queer, large 
sounds in the thickets and the deep tangles — 
breathings, and stirrings, and murmurings, all 
the more eerie because they had no name. If 
you've never been against it yourself, just 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 187 

fancy that you're afoot on one of those rough 
paths winding up a mountainside through the 
deep woods, without knowing where you are or 
just where you're coming out. There's no one 
with you to talk to ; you're plumb alone. And 
it's dark — not pitch-black, but a deep, murky 
darkness that your eyes can get used to just 
enough to let you make out dimly the gray, 
ghostly line of the trail and the huge bulk of 
the hill and the vaulted trees. There's no wind 
stirring to make a ripple on the profound 
quiet ; all you can hear is that pulsing, rustling 
quiver that is more like silence than sound. 

Writers of fiction always resort to the cheap 
trick of making a twig snap to startle a body 
in such a case. That's pure buncombe. Twigs 
don't snap. I haven't heard a twig snap in all 
these years in the woods unless I stepped on it 
myself. I've wished sometimes that one would 
snap, just to break the melancholy lonesome- 
ness. I'll tell you what does happen, though. 
Right at the instant when your senses are on 
the keen stretch and you're stumbling blindly 
along, more than half persuaded that you've 
lost your way, some little critter that's crouch- 
ing beside the path — a young cottontail, more 
than likely — gives a sudden hop ; and then you 



188 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

jump; and then the rabbit jumps and goes 
scuttling away in a panic of wild alarm, and 
then the short hair at the back of your neck 
gets that cold, crawly feeling — and you're 
scared. You needn't tell me you're not, be- 
cause I know better. It's all the same if it 
happens to be a baby-sized gray owl that sets 
up a sudden mocking, elfish chuttering on a 
low branch close overhead — you're scared. 
I've been scared badly enough to make my 
heart skip a couple of beats when a fat old toad 
that was squatted in the middle of the trail 
bounced up from between my feet and plopped 
off into the weeds. It's not a nice feeling; it 
makes a man ashamed of himself when he 
thinks about it ; but being ashamed won't stop 
it. That takes time; time enough to get over 
being an ahen. 

The same feeling — not of fear, but of 
strangeness — crept into our relations with our 
soil in the earlier years. I dare say every 
townsman who takes to farming goes at his 
work with a firmly fixed notion that he's going 
out to meet Goliath in combat — that he's pit- 
ting his intelligence against some rude, primal 
force in Nature that's opposed to him and that 
will overpower him if it can. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 189 

That's ignorance. There's nothing friend- 
lier in all this world than the good brown earth 
itself if only you can rid yourself of the feeling 
that its forces are fighting against you. 
They're not. If you persist in thinking so, and 
persist in fighting back, you're in pretty much 
the state of mind of the man who stays awake 
all night trying to drive the little green monkey 
off the foot of his bed. You're seeing things 
that don't exist. Do you suppose that feeling 
may be just a survival of the old time when 
men believed in a tribe of gods and demons 
who rode the wind and the clouds and the sun 
and trifled with human affairs in a reckless, 
devil-may-care sort of way ? I shouldn't won- 
der. There's a lot that's primitive still alive in 
the best of us. But maybe it's only the skit- 
tishness of plain ignorance. 

There's a mighty good way to exorcise those 
irresponsible spirits, if they beset you and 
you're afraid they're going to put their spell 
on your land. Beat them to it! Just go cou- 
rageously and serenely out, set your feet 
squarely on the soil and put your own spell 
upon it by doing some plain, every-day think- 
ing judiciously mixed with some plain, every- 
day hard work I That's all there is to it. 



190 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

Does that talk seem too hifalutin? I guess 
not. Most of you will get the gist of it, any- 
way. It's natural enough, I dare say, that a 
man should feel odd and awkward and doubt- 
ful in the first stages of a new life ; but it's bet- 
ter to get over that feeling so soon as you can. 
Your work doesn't really begin until that mood 
is past. 

All your soil wants from you is a sign that 
you're inclined to be friendly and that you're 
honestly trying to understand. Take this from 
me: Once that sign is given, once you do 
really put your mind upon your work, forth- 
with all the kinks have begun to straighten out. 
After that, you may do just what you like with 
your land. The soil isn't stubborn ; it isn't the 
least bit inclined to hold back on you and to 
yield its secrets and its fruits grudgingly. The 
clay is not more plastic to the hand of the pot- 
ter than the soil is plastic to the mind of the 
thinking farmer. He may do just what he 
wills with it. 

There were spots on our farm that had long 
ago been given up as hopeless, not worth the 
effort of reclaiming them. No raw townsman 
could be more timid than our tenant had been 
about making those spots of some account. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 191 

He'd made up his mind that it couldn't be 
done, and so he didn't try. 

One of those spots makes a part of the wheat 
field — a twelve-acre piece that was sown last 
fall to a fine beardless variety of red wheat. 
The field has been harvested to-day. On the 
older part, the part that was cleared and in 
use before we bought the farm, the yield will 
be twenty-seven or twenty-eight bushels to the 
acre; on the new part, the part we've added, 
we'll get ten bushels better. 

The first M^ork in clearing that neglected 
corner I did with my own ax, three years ago 
last winter. Part of it was stony, and part 
formed a low basin where the water would 
stand through the spring ; but the character of 
the wild growths — blackberry and sumac and 
tangled wild grapevines — showed that the soil 
was rich. It was no slouch of a job to get the 
rank stuff cut and piled for burning, for it 
stood upon the ground almost as thick as the 
wheat itself. But it was done by and by, and 
then Sam came to help with the rock-hauling. 
We lost count of the number of loads we 
moved, but when we were through with it we 
had a rough, heavy rock wall built along the 
bank of the near-by creek that had been catch- 



192 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

ing the wash from this field for years and 
years. 

The first year's use of the new corner didn't 
amount to much. The land was so wet that we 
couldn't give it its first plowing until early 
summer was upon us, and even then the break- 
ing wasn't what you'd call a good job. Roots 
and snags were too thick. We did the best we 
could, crossing and re-crossing it, taking every 
chance to let the plow go deep, tearing at the 
subsoil. Most farmers I think would have 
taken the easier way of ditching or tiling, to 
be rid of the excess water. Wherever we've 
come across such spots, though, we've tried 
thorough subsoiling first. Invariably we've 
found a clay "pan" beneath the surface that 
might be turned up and worked into the soil, 
making it possible for water to sink into the 
subsoil. I'd rather have it stored there for 
midsummer than to let it run away through a 
ditch in the spring. Without laying a foot of 
tile on the farm, we've reclaimed ten or a dozen 
acres here and there that the tenant hadn't 
tried to use at all. 

In the first year we made a late sowing of 
sorghum and cowpeas on that recovered cor- 
ner, sowing heavily so that the growth might 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 193 

serve to check the sprouts from the old roots. 
We fed a lot of that green through the sum- 
mer, and in October we got about three tons 
of fine hay to the acre. There's one of the 
happiest of hay combinations. Sorghum alone 
by its rank growth makes a heavy draft upon 
soil nitrogen and so tends to impoverishment; 
but if you put two or three pecks of sorghum 
with four or five of cowpeas, nitrogen is com- 
ing in faster than it goes out, so your soil is 
growing better. And when you cut your hay 
you have something — a well balanced ration, 
the cane supplying the carbohydrates which 
the pea- vines lack, and the vines supplying the 
proteids which the cane lacks. You can't 
beat it. 

The first crop helped that new land no end, 
and the hay we cut was worth here about $15 
a ton. For the second year we plowed again 
across and across, going deeper than before 
and tearing out wagonloads of roots and small 
stumps. Our cowpea-sorghum crop was re- 
peated, but we were able to plant much earlier, 
as the surface water bothered us very little. 
And then last fall, when the hay was cut, our 
wheat was sown after a new breaking and a 
thorough harrowing and dragging. This 



194 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

spring, though we've had uncommonly heavy- 
rains throughout the winter and the early- 
spring months, the trouble with standing water 
wasn't worth mentioning; and on that re- 
claimed spot the wheat is heavier and finer 
than on any other part of the field. 

We made that "go" mostly because we re- 
fused to believe, as many of the neighbors said, 
that the conditions were all hostile and that we 
couldn't fairly hope to win in a fight. In par- 
ticular they told us we were all wrong with 
our deep plowing, that the way to handle wet 
land was just to "skin" it with the plow. But 
we knew of one example in the neighborhood 
of a low, wet field that had been "skun," and 
we didn't like the looks of it. Tenant farmers 
have been handling the land for years, with 
corn and corn and nothing but corn. It's a 
long time since the plow has gone deeper than 
three inches — just deep enough to allow of 
dropping the corn in a shallow bed. Almost 
invariably the seed is planted in thick mud. 
Though the soil is of a high type, that sort of 
treatment makes it bake badly; and the culti- 
vator, instead of making a powdery mulch, 
tears it up into tough clods that bake hard as 
bricks. Cultivation must be abandoned before 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 195 

the beginning of summer; and of course the 
corn has a hard fight for it through the rest of 
the season against heavy grass and weeds. 
There's no help for it with that manner of 
treatment. If good farmers ever get hold of 
that field, they'll have harder work reclaiming 
it from the tenants' abuse than if they tackled 
it quite in the rough. 

We've taken great pride in working out half 
a dozen or more of those ugly waste places, 
and in doing it we've learned to waggle our 
fingers at all the hostile powers of earth and 
air. The tenants on that cloddy field below, 
if they're inclined that way, might easily be- 
lieve that the gods are against them. The 
crops they get ought to go far to confirm them. 
What's that you say? No great harm in nurs- 
ing that belief if it pleases them? Yes, but 
there is, though. The man who thinks that 
way is going to slacken his arm, and the gimp 
will go out of his step, and his mind will lose 
its bounce, and right in the middle of summer 
he'll own himself beaten. I'll leave it to you 
that that's no way. If there is any such thing 
as a rule for good farming, it is that the time 
never comes to relax effort to make something 
out of a growing crop. 



196 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

Another of the waste corners now carries 
our best asparagus bed. Here ran one of the 
old rail fences, grown up with briars and per- 
simmon bushes and pokeberry and careless- 
weed. When we had the row cleaned out it 
was manured and plowed as deeply as the 
plows could be sunk, then trenched and ma- 
nured again and worked over and over. Laura 
set the young crowns — a quarter of an acre; 
a space larger than a town lot. She wouldn't 
have help, for that bed was to be one of the 
permanent assets of her housekeeping. 

That was four years ago. Are you fond of 
asparagus? Did you ever have all you wanted? 
Let me ask you this : Did you ever try to keep 
it eaten as fast as it can come up on a well- 
tended quarter of an acre ? You haven't done 
any real asparagus eating till you've tried it 
that waj^ That store asparagus — shucks! 
Pale, listless, stringy stuff, spindling and 
wilted, with only a little nubbin at one end 
that's fit to eat, and you have to make a nui- 
sance of yourself at the table sucking even that 
little bit of "goody" out. That's no way. 

When we have asparagus for dinner, it's cut 
late in the afternoon, so it may go on to cook 
before the fresh, snappy crispness has gone 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 197 

out of it. Cutting the mess is my job. The 
thin, thready sprouts don't go into the basket; 
they're left on the ground. What I'm after is 
the lusty, vigorous shoot, thick as your thumb, 
that's made its six or eight inches of growth 
since morning and is standing straight as a 
soldier. I don't thrust my knife clear down 
to the crown in cutting as the market growers 
do, but cut close to the surface, well above all 
woody fiber. To the last fraction of an inch 
it's brittle and tender as a lettuce heart, and so 
full of juice that it drips. Now, you take 
asparagus like that, and let it be cooked just to 
the careful turn where it loses its raw taste 
without losing its firmness, and then let it come 
upon the table well drained and dressed with 
sweet butter and a dash of pepper and salt, and 
all piping hot — ^man, man, but that's eating! 
It takes a big dishful to go round at our house, 
and even then I'm always nervous lest it give 
out. 

Just one good spring dinner with asparagus 
a-plenty pays in delight for all the work we've 
done on that bed — and we've had a hundred 
of those dinners since the bed was set. And 
that, mind you, was made out of an odd patch 
of ground that nobody had ever thought worth 



198 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

working over. Our vineyard, too, stands on 
one of those redeemed corners; and last year 
we had cantaloupe and watermelons on an- 
other — melons by the hundred; rich, deep- 
fleshed, luscious fellows stretching over a sea- 
son of weeks and weeks through the hot middle 
of summer when nothing else will quite take 
the place of a good melon. We're fonder of 
our Rocky Fords than of anything else that 
comes out of the garden — unless it's a platter 
of plump, sweet, tender Country Gentleman 
corn — or maybe a creamy cauliflower. I don't 
know : new potatoes and sugar peas aren't bad, 
if they're brought in right fresh from the vines 
without a chance to wilt. A dead ripe, meaty 
tomato sliced over a buttery, crisp lettuce- 
heart is pretty good, too, especially when you 
flatter yourself that you know how to mix a 
French dressing that's just the least bit better 
than anybody else's. And did you ever eat a 
sauce of tender young beets dressed with good 
butter and homemade peach vinegar creamed 
up together? You ought to try that. Oh — 
and I'm near to forgetting the cucumbers. 
Maybe you don't know how good a cucumber 
can be. Most people don't. Most people are 
perfectly willing to tell the grocer over the 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 199 

telephone that they want some eucumhers — ■- 
he's just to pick out a couple of nice ones — 
and then they're stolidly content with what 
they get. One of the two will be a big, bloated 
thing, turning yellow on one side and as tough 
and tasteless as a piece of blotting paper, and 
the other a grass-green little affair with one 
end shrunken and twisted over like the neck of 
a gourd. And those are cucumbers I It serves 
a body right for expecting to get cucumbers 
out of a grocery store. 

There's only one place to get a real cucum- 
ber, and that's right fresh from a real cucum- 
ber vine in a real garden. Not any old cu- 
cumber vine will do ; it must be a real one. The 
hill it grows in must have been built up to the 
very pink of perfection in soil ; the seed that's 
planted in the hill must come from the cucum- 
ber aristocracy ; and from the day it thrusts its 
first tender leaves out of the ground the plant 
must have the most unremitting care. It must 
be nursed, and watered, and forced to its quick- 
est growth, and then be nipped back so that 
its whole succulence and vigor will go into a 
chosen small number of fruits. When those 
fruits are ready they'll be good to look at — ^ 
straight and plump and just of a certain inde- 



200 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

scribable shade of tender green that isn't seen 
anywhere outside a garden. On the last day 
they'll grow like soap-bubbles ; between morn- 
ing and evening, if you aren't watchful, they'll 
reach the line of perfection, leap over it, and be 
far on the downward road. If you want one at 
its best, you'd better mark the leaf it lies under 
and then go out every once in a while and take 
a peep. When you catch one just right, let 
me tell you you're a lucky man. Nobody on 
earth will have anything on you at dinner that 
night. 

It just does beat all what you can get out of 
the warm, mellow earth if you'll only forget 
the ignorant old notion that to work with the 
soil is a bitter contest against tremendous odds. 
If I felt like that, nothing could hire me to 
strike another lick at farming. I'd be all 
through, right now. But, feeling as I do, 
nothing could make me quit it. In sober 
truth, the ancient saying that men have been 
taking so hard, "in the sweat of thy brow," is 
a benediction instead of a curse. 

We found that out in our third year at 
Happy Hollow. I think that was our critical 
time. In that year all fear passed. Instead 
of the grim will to make our farm succeed, we 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 201 

were beginning to enjoy the fullness of realiza- 
tion. That couldn't have happened until we 
had put aside our lurking fear, which is the 
most inexcusable form of ignorance. 



X 



I've told you something about Jake, our 
hill-man friend who used to chop wood for us 
once in a while when his meal-sack was empty. 
I've told you, too, that poor Jake is dead. He 
was an odd chap; but there was no bad in him, 
so he must have been all good. 

His mother has just been down to see us. 
She doesn't know how old she is, but she is a 
very old woman, much stooped and all 
shrunken away in her husk. She always makes 
me think of a line of Knickerbocker History 
which observes that if a woman waxes fat as 
she grows old her tenure of life is precarious, 
"but if haply as the years pass she wither, she 
lives forever." That's what Jake's mother 
seems in a fair way of doing. She must be 
well on toward ninety ; but her eyes are bright 
with an unquenchable brightness. There was 
a new light in them this morning. 

She was very fond of Jake and very proud 
of him, for a reason mothers have. Sometimes 

202 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 203 

it's not easy for an outsider to understand. 
His death hurt her terribly. He wasn't her 
support, he didn't contribute the meal and 
meat she ate ; but in a way he helped her to get 
her living. Up to the time of his taking off, 
he and she were used to working together in 
the woods, at either end of a crosscut saw, cut- 
ting firewood at so much a "rick." Jake would 
find the jobs and then let his mother take a 
hand. She is still able to swing a heavy dou- 
ble-bitted ax like a veteran woodsman. I'm 
afraid she's going to miss Jake more than she 
knows. It isn't every man who's willing to 
hunt up work for so old a woman, even if she 
happens to be his mother. 

When she came down this morning she car- 
ried clutched in her lean hand a little wad of 
feathers crumpled and twisted together in a 
loose sort of rope. She was excited and eager 
when she held this out to let us see. 

"That thar's Jake's crown!" she said in a 
kind of elated awe. "Yist'day I ripped open 
the piller he used to sleep on, an' I found thish- 
yere, jest like I'm a-showin' it to you. Hit's 
a shore sign Jake's gone to Heaven an' is 
a-wearin' a crown up Yonder. My ol' Mammy 
tol' me that, an' she was a heap older woman 



204 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

than what I be, an' she knowed. Yes, sir, she 
knowed!" 

Once, two or three years ago, when the win- 
ter snows were too heavy to let her do much 
work in the woods, she was pretty hard put to 
it for a time. She used then to come down to 
Happy Hollow in the mornings to get a little 
milk. She wouldn't take it as a gift, and we 
had learned to know her fine pride too well to 
insist upon it. She kept tally some way; and 
then one morning when a mild spell had set in 
she appeared with her ax over her shoulder. 

"I come to pay for that thar milk you-all 
been lettin' me hev," she said. "Hit don't do 
for folks not to pay for what they git, jest be- 
cause they're pore." Nothing would do but 
that she must spend the long morning on our 
woodpile. What could we say? We let her do 
as she wanted. She's a brave old soul! Her 
whole life has been stripped down to the bare 
bones of hard need, with never a moment's 
hand-grip on even the least of life's advan- 
tages. In all her years she has never read a 
word nor seen with her own eyes anj^thing that 
lies beyond the rim of the hills that shut our 
neighborhood in. What she knows of Holy 
Writ has come to her obscurely in roundabout 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 205 

ways, by poor word of mouth, mixed with chaff 
and tares and smudged by the murky logic of 
the interpreters. You'd be likely to say that 
the path of her life hasn't been lit by any direct 
illuminating rays. In spite of that she has 
managed to keep a stanch steadfastness, a 
simple piety, an almost fierce loyalty to her 
standards. Don't call it crude. Such virtues 
are never crude. To be frank, I don't feel en- 
tirely sure on that point of Jake's crown; I'd 
rather take chances on his mother's, even with- 
out a sign or a portent to guarantee it. 

Just about the best of the values we've got 
from our life at Happy Hollow has been the 
human value. I used to think I knew people 
pretty well and could judge their motives 
fairly ; but that was only a townsman's conceit. 
Looking back, it's no trouble to see how mis- 
taken some of those old notions were — pitifully 
one-sided, thin-blooded, bad-tempered. One's 
judgments of men change, not so much be- 
cause the men themselves grow better or worse, 
but rather because his own motives and man- 
ner of judgment change. My way of measur- 
ing folks has grown kindlier; that's how I 
know it's juster, better. 

If you're inclined to insist that the way to 



206 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

come at an opinion of a man is to pick the flaws 
in him and find out his weaknesses, you're not 
likely to be happy in a country neighborhood. 
I don't know why, but that way won't work in 
a country neighborhood. Maybe it's because 
the countryman falls into a calmer habit of 
mind, so that other people may have their little 
faults without irritating him. Maybe it's be- 
cause neighbors are so few in the countryside 
that we can't afford not to hunt out the best 
we can find in each other and dwell upon that. 
Whatever the reason, the associations of the 
country are a lot simpler and freer than in 
town. There's less of show about us, and so 
less of the silly discontent that mere show 
breeds. Only once in a long time does any of 
us pretend to a social "affair"; mostly we just 
visit round in the plain country way, taking 
each other as we're found without the "dog." 
Of course that gives us more time and better 
chance for finding what's real and worth while 
in each other; and that's all that counts, isn't 
it? 

Oh, yes, we have our little spells of being 
offish, but they don't last. Often enough one 
or another of the folks around here has miffed 
us a bit or given us excuse for talking him over 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 207 

and saying to ourselves how "queer" he was; 
but that talk has always taken the other tack 
before we were done with it. 

"Never mind!" That's the way we're apt 
to sum it up. "He's a good neighbor, take 
him altogether. We shouldn't want to get 
along without him." And at that we're not 
trying merely to make the best of a poor busi- 
ness. Our feeling for our neighbors amounts 
to good, simple liking. That's the way it 
ought to be. You can't get good from a man 
— no, nor do him any good — by holding him in 
low esteem. Out in the country we easily get 
into the way of weeding the garden of our so- 
cial relations as we weed out our kitchen gar- 
dens and our flower beds, keeping them as free 
as we can of nettles and cockleburs. It's not 
hard work, once you get used to it, and it gives 
you much to enjoy. 

We've been out of sorts, time and again, 
over something we felt to be a lapse in neigh- 
borliness. We have a "stock law" here in the 
hill country which requires every farmer to 
keep his animals inclosed and makes him liable 
for damages if they're allowed to stray. It's 
a good enough law on the books, but it's ob- 
served mostly only in the breach. Arkansas 



208 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

folk have never grown used to building good 
fences nor to keeping them up. When the 
"natives" lived on the farms around us, their 
cattle and pigs and mules were always wander- 
ing in and tasting our growing crops. That's 
irritating ; no farmer likes it. We used to get 
quite angry about it sometimes, when it ap- 
peared that arguments and warnings did no 
good. I suppose that anger was the towns- 
man's habit persisting. You know you'd fuss 
with a man if he lived on the next town lot to 
yours and if his cow would come over and muss 
up your lawn or trample your lettuce patch. 
Without half trying you could work yourself 
up to heated words and strained relations. 
That's because you'd be able to get to him 
right away before your temper would have 
time to simmer down. But it would be differ- 
ent if he lived half a mile away across the fields 
and woods. Even if you set off at white heat 
to see him about it, and rehearsed to yourself 
all the way what you'd say to him, by the time 
you got there you'd be cooled off in spite of 
yourself, and your quarrel would be resolved 
into nothing fiercer than a friendly glass of 
cold buttermilk and a bit of friendly chat about 
the look of the crops, with maybe a few words 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 209 

at the last of mild suggestion that you really 
ought to be getting together somehow about 
that division fence. That's the way we Ve found 
it. I don't take any stock at all now in the 
romances about family feuds arising over 
boundary lines and trespasses and such like. 
They aren't reasonable among farmer-neigh- 
bors. 

There was one old man on a farm down the 
valley who was a steady offender. He wasn't 
exactly a farmer, though he lived on a farm; 
that is, he didn't work at farming. He owned 
a few cattle that rustled a living as they could 
on the poor brush-land he called his pasture. 
The pasture was inclosed in a happy-go-lucky 
sort of way by a few strings of rusted old wire ; 
but half the posts were rotted out and the wires 
sagged along the ground or were caught up 
and held in the tangle of bushes. The cows 
found it no barrier; they strayed where they 
would, and they were always coming into our 
crops. The old man had no time to fix his 
fences; he was too busy sitting on his porch 
figuring out easy ways to get rich — if he only 
had money enough to get some of his schemes 
a-going. He was desperately poor, as poor 



210 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

as his cattle, 1but his unfailing visions kept him 
buoyantly cheerful. 

I liked the old chap ; but I couldn't manage 
to match his cheerfulness with those cows wan- 
dering over the place. When their own pas- 
tures grew short, they'd visit us two or three 
times a week. Always the old man was full 
of gentle sorrow; always he promised that it 
wouldn't happen again; but it kept right on 
happening until one day we shut the beasts up 
and sent our neighbor word that he must pay 
for the damage done. I was just hot enough 
to insist upon it when he came over to see 
about it. He was genuinely distressed. He 
had no money, he said, but if I'd let him take 
his cows home he'd "work it out" on the farm. 
He worked for half a day at a couple of odd 
jobs, then borrowed a couple of dollars for 
some pressing need at home — and the next day 
the cows were back again. 

We stood for that sort of annoyance so long 
as the easy-going folk of the old school were 
about us. It didn't hurt us any. It was good, 
human discipline. We came through those ex- 
periences on friendly terms with everybody, 
though we never got used to their ways, nor 
they to ours. That isn't necessary, is it? The 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 211 

best of life is give-and-take. Nobody really 
thrives on having everything his own way. 
That's plain enough; but we had to come to 
the country to learn it. 

We entered upon our fourth year of farm- 
ing with forty acres of our land in fine condi- 
tion for cropping, clear of the old stumps and 
stone, the soil so greatly improved in texture 
by successive deeper and deeper breaking that 
we could be sure of passing through dry weath- 
er unharmed. The burning summer winds that 
sometimes blight the prairie country to the 
west of us never come into our hills, but occa- 
sionally we have a dry spell rather long drawn 
out. We've had one this year, and this has 
shown as well as anything could the advantage 
of handling our soil in our way. 

When I began writing this story it was early 
May. Our corn was then six inches high. It 
is now the middle of June. A fine, soft rain 
has been falling steadily for twenty-four hours, 
every drop of it going into the ground. This 
is the first rain we've had in five weeks. Our 
corn is now waist-high, its foliage of that rich 
black-green the farmer likes to see. Not a leaf 
has curled ; not a plant in the field has halted in 
its vigorous growth. We're mighty glad the 



212 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

rain has come, of course; but its delay hasn't 
hurt our corn a nickel's worth. 

It's very different on some of the farms 
around us. Yesterday morning, before the 
rain began, I looked at two fields that were 
planted when we planted ours. Both those 
fields have been badly hurt by the drought; 
the plants are not more than half the height 
of ours, and their leaves are sun-dried, pale 
and sick. With the best of care for the rest 
of the season that corn won't make half a nor- 
mal crop. 

The reason? That land was plowed only 
about four inches deep, and the subsoil wasn't 
touched. Cultivation was abandoned two 
weeks ago because the teams couldn't pull a 
"double shovel" through the sun-hardened 
soil; so the fields are foul with weeds. The 
weeds have drawn heavily upon the little mois- 
ture that was stored, and the loss by evapora- 
tion has been great. On the contrary, we have 
kept the cultivators going steadily every day 
of those five dry weeks, stirring the surface 
into a fine, shallow dust mulch to cover our 
foot-deep seed bed. On the hottest day of the 
drought if the mulch were kicked aside the soil 
beneath appeared black with abundant mois- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 213 

ture. The field has been kept absolutely free 
of weeds, so we aren't put to it now to catch 
up after a time of dispirited neglect. One 
more cultivation and our corn is "made" — and 
it will be a top-notch crop. You needn't tell 
me that this way of doing things isn't right or 
that it doesn't pay. I'm ready to bet that this 
year at Happy Hollow we'll beat the average 
corn crop of the state at least four to one. 

Our fourth year gave us the proof on this 
corn practice, if we needed proof. We had 
twenty acres of our best land in corn that year, 
and it was given the same care our field has 
had this year. In that year we found that the 
mark we'd set of a hundred bushels to the acre 
wasn't a crazy vision. A part of our field, 
where the plows had gone deepest and the sub- 
soil conditions were best, made a surprising 
showing for itself as the season advanced. It 
came mighty near being perfect corn, almost 
entirely free of barren stalks, the long plump 
ears well set low on the stalks. At harvest a 
measured acre gave us one hundred and ten 
bushels of as fine grain as any farmer would 
want to see. The rest of the field had received 
the same attention in cultivation and in every 
other particular, following the spring break- 



214 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

ing; but there was still some stone in the sub- 
soil, preventing a deep and thorough stirring. 
There lay the whole of the difference in condi- 
tions. July of that year was a dry month, too, 
and though the ears formed pretty much alike 
over the whole field, there wasn't moisture 
enough in the shallower bed to mature them 
well. 

In that year we gave thorough trial to the 
"wide row" method of corn culture which the 
Government experts are advocating for the 
South. You know what that is, I reckon. In- 
stead of having the rows four feet apart and 
the hills three feet apart in the rows, after the 
usual farm practice, the rows are spaced to six 
feet and the hills to two feet. Both spacings 
give twelve square feet of ground to the hill, 
so there is no difference in the number of hills 
an acre will carry. Advantage is claimed for 
the six-foot row because the cultivator may be 
run throughout the growing season. A row 
of cowpeas may be planted between each two 
rows of corn, and if the cultivator is made to 
straddle the pea row both crops are given at- 
tention at once. It's a fine theory, and it works 
well in practice; but this year we're back to 
the old three-by-four system. This enables us 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 215 

to run the cultivators in both directions and to 
keep the rows entirely clean of weeds through 
spring and early summer. In a dry time like 
that we've just been through a heavy growth 
of weeds in the rows would have done a lot of 
harm by wasting moisture the corn needed. 
We're strongly "agin" weeds in our crops at 
Happy Hollow. I've had many chances for 
measuring the advantages of both methods in 
all parts of the state on the lands of good farm- 
ers, and I haven't been able to find that the 
new has anything on the old at harvest time. 
A clean field after harvest counts for a lot 
with us. So there's one proposition in which 
we'll follow the old fashion against the new. 

That's been our rule on the farm — to try 
without prejudice any new cropping method 
that gives a reasonable offer of better results, 
but not to persist in it to our own cost just be- 
cause it is new. We've know men who seemed 
to think they weren't practicing modern farm- 
ing unless every^ scrap and shred of every idea 
in use belonged to the twentieth century. 
That's foolish. There's a great deal of good 
sound usage in the "old" farming. Indeed, 
so far as I've been able to discover, modern 
farming consists simply in doing the old things 



216 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

in a more intelligent and businesslike way. 
Nature's laws are very ancient and firmly set- 
tled. The scientific farmer hasn't grafted any 
new laws upon her code ; he's tried only to get 
a better understanding of the old so that they 
might be better observed. The real service and 
the real inspiration of modern farming lies 
simply in stimulating the farmer to think about 
his work — to keep his head on the job as well 
as his hands. There's nothing dark or mys- 
terious about this ''science." The business of 
feeding the world must go forward. That 
work is piling up on us with greater and great- 
er demands. The time is clear past when a 
surplus of foodstuffs here or there need go 
unused. Supplies will have to be increased. 
There's the fact that has brought the farmer 
fully into the big task. The thinking and plan- 
ning of the task isn't to be left now altogether 
to middlemen and distributors. The farmer 
himself is taking a thinking part. Conditions 
are compelling him to think about increased 
production, lowering of costs, elimination of 
wastes, and saving of profits for himself. The 
new farmer differs from the "old" farmer only 
in being trained to think up to the times instead 
of in the past. They're not distinct breeds, as 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 217 

some folk would have you believe. The most 
hardened "old" farmer of the lot may shake 
himself awake into a "new" one whenever he 
will. It's a good deal like "getting religion." 
We don't leave that to our sons on the theory 
that we're too old to learn better morals. It's 
a mistake to argue that only the school-trained 
youngsters may be modern farmers. The old- 
timers are dead wrong in supposing that mod- 
ern farming is made up wholly of a lot of new- 
fangled notions. It isn't. It's just the old 
farming with new life put into it. 

You see I can't help quitting my own story 
once in a while to take up a bit of argument; 
but all the time I'm thinking of its bearing on 
our farm operation. We couldn't get any- 
where in our farming without an occasional 
spell of argufying and theorizing. 

We did a lot of it in our fourth year. That 
was the time when it was borne in upon me 
that the difference between profit and loss in 
farming hangs upon a slender peg. The farm- 
er who isn't minding his p's and q's may make 
or lose money without knowing how it hap- 
pens. That's particularly true in what's known 
as "general farming." The man who's stick- 
ing to one project — poultry, peaches, potatoes 



218 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

or pigs — is able to keep a closer watch upon 
possible leaks and losses than he who has half 
a dozen irons in the fire. The average "gen- 
eral" farm leaks like a sieve, and it's very hard 
to discover the flaws. It needs a wizard to 
check one operation against the other and keep 
the reckoning straight. 

In our fourth season I tried to figure out a 
system of accounting that would enable me to 
strike a balance at the year's end and deter- 
mine with a fair degree of accuracy how much 
money I had made or lost in growing my oats 
and corn and peas. I couldn't do it. I haven't 
been able to do it to this day. I don't believe 
it's possible. The cleverest method of reckon- 
ing has something arbitrary and artificial in it 
— something that must be taken for granted. 
The balance must be forced. On a farm one 
gets so many things that can't be measured in 
dollars and cents. And there are the endless 
losses by leakage which can't be estimated. 

At the beginning of that fourth year I laid 
out a plat of the farm on paper, with each field 
measured in acres, and with a carefully stud- 
ied schedule of a cropping system that would 
cover the next three years. That was all right 
enough, but before the middle of summer I 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 219 

had to consider a number of things that 
weren't to be foreseen by any uninspired 
farmer. 

Our pigs got away from us. From a mod- 
est beginning with a few good brood animals 
our herd had increased to a hundred head of 
sows and pigs. Our losses by death had been 
next to nothing at all. On its face that's a 
fine exhibit. Almost anybody could take a 
stubby pencil and a scrap of paper and figure 
himself rich at the end of a few years at that 
rate of increase. Two broods a year, six pigs 
to the brood — why, that's 1,200 per cent, in- 
crease, isn't it? And a money-lender gets rich 
at eight or ten per cent! What's the matter 
with farming? 

Nothing at all — nothing but the chance of 
losing several thousand per cent in taking care 
of that increase and bringing it up to market- 
able condition. A growing pig is the most de- 
ceiving beast in the catalogue. His gain in 
weight may cost you two cents a pound or 
twenty or forty. That depends upon your 
management. 

We had too many pigs, considering the con- 
dition of our farm. If we had let it go on at 
that rate, we'd have had five or six times as 



220 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

many at the end of another year. But the farm 
wasn't ready to take care of a hundred at a 
profit. We might have managed according 
to the usual farm practice, shutting the pigs 
up in a dry lot and pouring in corn and corn 
and corn. That wouldn't have paid. An un- 
comfortable, discontented pig will squeal away 
a peck of corn in a day. The profit in pig- 
growing is made while the animals are putting 
on their first two hundred pounds of weight 
on green pasture — clover or peas or small 
grain or rape. With the plantings well man- 
aged on good land, that growth ought not to 
cost more than two cents a pound. The "fin- 
ishing" twenty-five or thirty pounds made on 
corn feeding with a vigorous animal costs six 
or eight cents a pound. If the pig is brought 
up on corn only from the time he's weaned till 
he's baconed, you may have four times as much 
money tied up in him as you'll ever be able to 
get out. Well, what about it ? Isn't that a sit- 
uation that calls for some thinking? 

We hadn't any money to lose. We cut down 
our herd, a few head at a time, till we had it 
trimmed to the point where our pastures would 
carry the animals that were left. We kept 
about twenty, besides those that were to be fat- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 221 

tened for making our own meat. These twen- 
ty were carefully selected, and with the herd 
I put a new male of a registered line, bought 
in Kansas. He came of a prolific strain, fa- 
mous for getting thrifty pigs that would make 
maximum gains on good feeding. You ought 
to see that boy to-day, if you have any doubts 
as to the value of good breeding in meat ani- 
mals on the farm. He's just a little more than 
two years old, but he's as long as a cow and 
weighs six hundred pounds. When he's put 
in "show" condition for the county fair 
next fall he'll weigh all of eight hundred 
pounds. He's some pig! It's hard to 
believe that he belongs to the same tribe 
as the native hogs we've seen in these hills. 
Did you ever notice a genuine Arkansas hog? 
He's not big enough to eat till he's four years 
old. He's built on the lines of a race horse — 
slim and limber and high off the ground. He 
runs free in the woods, and at butchering time 
the hill people hunt down their meat with 
hounds and gun. When you cook a strip of 
the bacon you have to use store lard to fry it 
in. That's no joke. I've seen a couple of pig 
hunters come in from the chase with half a 
dozen carcasses hanging from a stick swung 



222 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

across their shoulders. It's only by courtesy 
that you can call such beasts "domestic ani- 
mals." The only living creature that ever 
made me climb a tree was an old white sow 
I met once on a woods trail. Such hogs 
haven't anything at all in common with our 
huge, mild-tempered Happy Hollow Bob. 
The difference is all in the breeding. Old Bob 
gives a good account of every pound of bran 
and middlings and corn that goes into his 
trough ; but I've seen native hogs that wouldn't 
show any effect at all of such feeding beyond 
swelling up in the middle. 

Finding myself overstocked with hogs, with 
a surplus that might not be handled profitably, 
didn't decide me to get out of raising pigs. It 
did set me to analyzing the business as closely 
as possible in an effort to find its strength and 
its weaknesses. I beheve my conclusions right. 
These conclusions apply pretty well to every 
operation on a farm like ours. 

Much of the danger of disappointment and 
loss in small farming lies in the margin of sur- 
plus which the farmer is likely to find in his 
hands from time to time, a surplus which can't 
be handled to advantage on the farm and 
which is too small to justify great care in mar- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 223 

keting. He may have a few extra head of 
pigs that can't be put in marketable condition 
at a profit and that must be sold for what they 
will bring close by. He may have a few extra 
bushels of apples or potatoes. It's a pity to 
let them waste; but there isn't enough of the 
stuff to pay for hunting the best possible 
market. Counting time, the only thing to do 
is to peddle it out for what it will bring on the 
local market — and country town markets for 
farm produce are almost invariably in the 
hands of small middlemen who don't like to 
pay profits to the farmer. Those little jags 
of surplus almost inevitably spell loss to the 
grower. That loss is the very thing that has 
discouraged many and many a townsman in 
his essay of farming. 

My own study of the matter has had the pig 
for its object. I've settled it just this way in 
my own mind : 

I'll breed no more pigs than the farm is able 
to carry to maturity with its own pasture and 
forage crops. I want to avoid a surplus that 
must be fed at a loss or sold at a sacrifice. If 
there's ever a surplus of pasture or feed on the 
place it will be easy enough to get extra pigs 
to consume it. According to that method my 



224 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

herd will not be large. I'll break no records 
with the number of animals handled. But 
every beast in the herd will be handled at a 
real profit, and there will be no losses to set 
off against the profits at the season's end. 

I'm going farther than that with the pig 
business. Two years from now I shan't be 
selling a live pig off the place save as I have 
one now and then that will bring a fancy price 
for breeding purposes. Two years from now 
every pig that's bred and grown and finished 
on the farm will be converted right here into 
fancy hams and bacon and sausage, and these 
products will find their way straight to con- 
sumers who are able to know a good thing 
when they get it. We've tried this in a small 
way, and we know it will work. Every penny 
of profit that's made in that business we'll be 
able to keep for ourselves. The danger of loss 
will be practically wiped away. I want to say 
something more about that before I'm done 
with the story. 



XI 



This is June twentieth, right at the zenith 
of the long summer days. Sam has had a 
grouch since early morning. You wouldn't 
know it unless you knew him. Most Irishmen 
have a way of cutting loose when they're hot 
about something — using fiery w^ords, or slam- 
ming their tools around, or yanking at their 
beasts at the plow. That isn't Sam's way. 
The madder Sam gets the quieter he is. When 
he's really in a rage you'd hardly know he's 
about. He moves very softly and speaks not 
at all. And man, dear, how he does work 
when one of those fits is on him! I shouldn't 
care if he stayed mad all the time through 
the rush season. 

We've been stacking our wheat to-day, to 
have it ready for the threshers. There are two 
young mountains of it, mighty rich-looking in 
their deep golden yellow. It was hard work 
to build them, though; hot work too, along in 
the middle of the day, in the brilliant glare of 

225 



226 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

the summer sun. The thermometer was a 
shade over ninety, and the lazy breeze merely 
crawled across the land. No matter what a 
man's disposition, he's bound to feel uncom- 
fortable in the fields on such a day. 

The slow mood of it got into the workers. 
We wanted to get the wheat shocks off in a 
hurry so the plows might be at the land while 
it's still mellow from the fine rain of Wednes- 
day. Our cowpeas ought to be seeded on the 
newly turned stubble within the next couple 
of days. As we saw it, there was good reason 
for hurry. 

The extra helpers didn't want to hurry. 
They picked up the pace of the listless air and 
crawled with it. Three of them couldn't throw 
the bundles upon the load as fast as Sam could 
handle them. They moped. They stopped 
often to wipe away the sweat and to measure 
with unfriendly eyes the part of the task still 
undone. They'd much rather have had a half 
crop than a bumper. 

"Wusht I c'd quit an' go swummin'," one 
of them lamented after dinner. "Thish-yere 
work would keep twel Monday. Hit's too 
hot." 

That was Oscar talking. Oscar had had his 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 227 

board for the week, and he'd done work enough 
to set him three dollars ahead ; so he had a fine, 
large, easy feehng that didn't match up at all 
with the labor of the harvest field. Another 
of the men did quit after an hour's work in 
the afternoon. He had to go into town and 
loaf a little while on the "square" before the 
day was done. That's a firmer habit here on 
Saturday afternoons than going to church on 
Sunday. Pretty soon another hand laid off. 
Whenever one of them stopped Sam quickened 
his own gait to make up. He didn't speak his 
impatience, as another man might have done ; 
he just shut his mouth and worked. The wheat 
was all in stack when night fell. The last 
bundles went up in murky half-darkness ; but 
the job was done. 

Sam was tired when he brought up the team 
to the watering trough at the well. He didn't 
have to tell me; I knew. While the beasts 
drank he lounged wearily on the end of the 
trough, looking away across the twilight fields. 
He wasn't saying a word, but there was an 
air about him of temper smoldering. 

"Well," I said, "it's finished anyway. 
That's some comfort." 

He grinned. It takes a pretty good man to 



228 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

grin like that right in the middle of a grouch. 
"Yes, that's some comfort," he agreed. *'But 
there's not comfort enough in it to keep me 
from being mad. I'm mad." 

"Forget it!" I said lightly. "This is Satur- 
day night. You'll have a good rest to-mor- 
row." 

"I don't want to rest," he snapped. "I don't 
care if I never rest. I don't get mad because 
I have to work hard; it's because the other 
man don't want to. If he'd hold up his 

end And I don't seem to get ahead at it 

any faster than he does." 

"You get a steady job," I said. 

"I get a steady chance to keep right on 
workin' my fool head off!" he retorted. "And 
I like to loaf as well as the next man too, when 
I can see my way to it. I ain't sure they 
haven't got the best of it." 

Well, that's an old, old question, of course; 
but it's everlastingly a live, brand-new ques- 
tion on the farm, where you can't possibly see 
instant results of your work. The curious 
thing about it is that the more forehanded you 
are and the busier you keep, the less chance 
there is of measuring effects. So many, many 
"ifs" creep in! 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 229 

There's that wheat stacking, for example. 
Rushing it through bred dead weariness of 
body and heaviness of spirit. It might have 
been just as well to let the last of the job lie 
over to another day and come at it then in bet- 
ter temper. But we really ought to have the 
peas planted without the loss of an hour, so 
they'll use every drop of the moisture that's 
in the soil, A stubble field will bake hard in 
a hurry in this sun if it isn't turned and har- 
rowed. There's no telling when we'll have an- 
other rain. Tons of water will be sucked up 
out of the ground on a hot June day. Those 
tons of water will make a sight of difference in 
the start our pea vines get, and a difference of 
tons of hay in the fall. Nobody knows. The 
safest way to play it was the hardest way, the 
way that wouldn't make any compromise. It 
took the sap out of the men and put them all 
out of sorts with their taskmasters; but we've 
gained a day at the height of the year. If we 
can gain a few days more in the same way 
before mid-July those days may easily settle 
whether our mows and stacks are half empty 
or full to bursting for the winter. 

What's that? It's a gamble, either way? 
Are you right sure of that? That's what the 



230 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

laborers thought to-day. But as I think of it, 
it doesn't strike me that way. 

Farming is a gamble only when the farmer 
takes gambling chances. We might have tak- 
en one to-day. Maybe we'd have won, maybe 
we'd have lost. It was a toss-up. We made 
it less of a gamble when we cut down the loss 
chance. It's only when he refuses to take any 
loss chance at all he can avoid that the farmer 
dare call himself scientific. Isn't that right? 

If there's any doubt in your mind, look over 
the farms of the men who take chances and 
those who don't. There's a case in point in 
our neighborhood right now. One of our 
neighbors grew twenty acres of oats. His 
land was in bad condition in spring — full of 
stones and stumps, as ours was six years ago. 
He couldn't make a real seed bed, of course; 
he just scratched his seed into the surface. 
Chance number one. He got a poor stand. 
The recent drought caught his crop and made 
it certain that the grain wouldn't mature, so 
he cut it for hay while it was in the milk. He 
tore a mowing machine to bits in the cutting — 
he thought he could dodge the stumps and 
bowlders, but he ran into them every once in a 
while. Chance number two. He lost lots of 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 231 

his hay because his rake wouldn't work clean 
on the rough ground. Because he wasn't fond 
of the burning middays he put most of the hay 
into the stacks in the cool of the mornings be- 
fore the dew was well dried off, and he built 
the stacks in a shady place. Chance number 
three. His stacks are heating badly; they're 
bound to rot if they aren't torn down and dried 
out and rebuilt. At that his hay will be black- 
ened and poor in quality. 

Just across the fence our oats ripened per- 
fectly, and we'll thresh a real crop. We re- 
fused every one of the chances our neighbor 
took. We got our seed where he got his, and 
the fields were planted at the same time. Acre 
for acre, we'll have twice as much straw as he 
has hay, and we'll have our ripe grain besides. 
There's just the difference. 

And there's the question of the second crop 
following the small grain. Some of my neigh- 
bors have laughed at me for that practice. 
Not many of them observe it themselves. They 
say it's too risky to plant cowpeas in the mid- 
dle of summer, after wheat and oats harvest — 
that if the season happens to be an "off" one 
they won't get hay enough to pay for the seed. 
They insist that we're taking the gambler's 



232 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

chance when we plant so late as the first of 
July. 

The way we look at it, we can't afford not 
to take that chance. If we allowed our fields 
to lie idle through the long summer months, 
we'd simply be betting on a dead certainty of 
losing. As a matter of fact, our midsummer 
cropping hasn't proved a risk. In five years 
we've failed only once in getting a crop of pea 
vines heavy enough to cut for hay. That fail- 
ure was on one small field which wasn't seeded 
until mid- July ; and on that we got our money 
back by pasturing and plowing under the 
stubble for wheat in September. If we got 
nothing from the peas but the new nitrogen 
stored at their roots, we'd keep on planting 
them. If we gained no advantage but the finer 
tilth the plowing and harrowing and dragging 
give for the crop to come after, still we'd keep 
on planting them. Considering the practically 
unfailing hay crop on top of these benefits, 
don't you think we'd be taking a foolish chance 
if we didn't plant? 

Most of the cases of this sort on the farms, 
with the farmers declining such chances, have 
their root in shiftlessness and not in good busi- 
ness prudence. "I've worked enough for this 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 233 

year." There's the easy formula that halts 
many a farmer at his work in mid-year, just 
at the point where profit-making might begin. 
It's the rule rather than the exception down 
here to consider that the working season on the 
land is done when corn is "laid by." Then 
comes a gap of months when the farmer fills 
in with occasional odd jobs for somebody else. 
That's habit rather than necessity. It's a bad 
habit, for it almost inevitably means loss. The 
farmer simply bets that he's going to lose, and 
then sets about winning his own bet. 

We've found a thousand chances at Happy 
Hollow for betting against ourselves in just 
that way. We've taken some of them to our 
cost. It's not easy to keep an eye on all the 
odds and ends on a hundred and twenty acres 
and have everything done on time. Once we 
killed a horse by turning him into a newly 
fenced pasture where there was a loose strand 
of old wire lying on the ground in a brush- 
grown corner. We were crowded for time! 
we thought we could safely put off that last de- 
tail of inspection for a day or so. We took a 
chance that cost us a hundred dollars. 

We took a chance, two winters ago, in clear- 
ing up a lot of new ground. The time was 



234 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

favorable for the work, and we let our ambi- 
tion run away with us, lightly taking it for 
granted that we'd be able to keep the new acre- 
age in cultivation. There was no time to move 
the stone before spring plowing; we haven't 
found time for it yet; so that ten acre patch 
has "gone back" to brush. The clearing will 
have to be done over again before the land can 
be used. There's a loss of fifty dollars charge- 
able to bad judgment. 

Two years ago we put down a drilled well, 
fifty feet deep, to furnish water for the stables. 
When we were setting the pump we dropped 
the valve and a length of pipe down the tube. 
We had no grappling tool handy, so we turned 
to other work till we might get one. That 
pipe is still down there, waiting, and we're 
still watering horses and cattle unhandily. In 
the two years we've lost solid days of time on 
account of that carelessness ; and there's an in- 
vestment of seventy-five dollars that hasn't 
done us a speck of good so far. We've grown 
accustomed now to having that well out of com- 
mission. We'll get to it one of these days. It 
ought to have been attended to right off the 
reel. 

Gates break down, and we think there isn't 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 235 

time to mend them at once; then before we 
know it cattle and pigs have strayed into the 
growing crops. Minutes would have fixed the 
gates ; but now we've lost the labor of hours. 

We ought to have had a small blacksmithing 
shop on the farm long ago ; but we've put that 
off. Trips to town for repairs have cost ten 
times as much as it would have cost to build 
and equip the shop; and we could have saved 
many a tool that has gone into the discard. 

It does beat the world how many losses of 
that sort a farmer can count up when he really 
puts his mind to it. I've had myself in train- 
ing this year, making a tour of the place every 
once in a while and noting holes in our scheme, 
through which money is getting away from us. 
It's been mighty good discipline, though I'll 
own it's disconcerting to find so many things 
that have been overlooked before. 

Some of these things are justified. We 
haven't had time or money enough for bring- 
ing every part of the farm up to good form. 
Our forty acres of timber, with its abundant 
water, ought to be well fenced and seeded to 
grass and clover. We'd make money on that ; 
but we haven't yet been able to attend to it. 
We ought to improve our water supply in the 



236 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

pastures we've made, so that we could have 
full use of every subdivision at any time in the 
year without extra labor of caring for the 
stock. Every dollar spent in that way would 
be a dollar doubled. Then there's that job of 
foresting the woods forty. That would pay 
handsomely, beyond all question. But it will 
take a nice little lump of money to put it 
through, and I shall have to put in full time 
with the workers. I haven't been able to do 
that yet. And so with a score of things that 
wait to be done before we can call this a thor- 
oughly established farm. I'm not blaming my- 
self because the work of that sort isn't all fin- 
ished. The losses arising from the delays I can 
take cheerfully. Sometimes I wish I could go 
right at it full tilt with an army of men and 
have everything done at once ; but in my saner 
intervals I'm glad I can't have it that way. 
There's a lot more satisfaction in working as 
we've had to work, taking our tasks one at a 
time and feeling that each task completed 
stands for a real difficulty mastered. It doesn't 
do to have things come too easily. 

There's another sort of loss I'm not so com- 
placent about. That's the loss that grows out 
of sheer neglect. If things once done on a 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 237 

farm aren't kept up by eternal vigilance, all 
profits may be absorbed in no time. Every 
farmer is more or less slack in that particular. 
I'm in the same potful as the rest of them. 

Sam won't mind if I say outright that that's 
the only quarrel I've had with him. He's not 
a careful manager in details. He's a master 
hand at a big, tough job afield that would dis- 
may an ordinary man; but he hates to tinker 
round keeping up the loose ends. That seems 
to him too much like boy's play. He'd rather 
tear out a whole string of fence and rebuild it 
than walk along the line with a hammer and 
a pocketful of staples, tacking up the wires 
that have sagged from the posts. He'd rather 
whirl in and dig a new well than help to fish 
the lost pipe out of the old one. He'd rather 
build a new barn than fuss with driving a time- 
ly nail to save a partition the colts have kicked 
loose. You can't find fault with him for that 
disposition. I'd rather have him fit for big 
things than little ones. Just the same, those 
pesky mickles make a very mountain of a 
muckle. I've had an extra man on the farm 
for a month this summer, catching up those 
straggling ends, and there's another month's 
work ahead of him. 



238 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

Every farm in the country hereabouts is rich 
in the poor fruits of such neglect. On the best 
of them all a one-eyed man could find fifty 
ragged signs of inattention to details. Have 
you ever seen a farm anywhere that showed 
none of them ? I haven't. 

The root of the trouble seems to be that 
there isn't any standard in the mind of the 
farmer for thrift in such things. With most 
of us thrift is nothing but an abstract notion 
and not a clear rule of action. None of us is 
able to say for sure that he's practicing real 
thrift in the care of his acres or in any part 
of his work — that he can't improve upon his 
methods while using no more than his present 
working capital. We have no model to go by, 
even in our mind's eye. 

I've set out to change that this year. I'm 
fixing up a model patch right in the heart of 
the farm that will serve for our guidance. I 
believe the plan will work. 

This patch has always been a rough looker. 
It includes about four acres lying between our 
kitchen garden and the well-tended fields. The 
land is stony, and there's a rain-washed gutter 
running through the middle of it. A tight red 
clay subsoil comes up close to the surface. A 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 239 

few of our apple trees were planted at the edge 
of the patch, but they haven't thrived. Noth- 
ing will thrive there till we go at it and give it 
a thorough overhauling. It's in no worse con- 
dition than some of the rest of our land has 
been; but it's in bad shape. We've let it lie 
from year to year in all its unsightliness, wait- 
ing till there would be time for fixing it up 
right. It's not an inviting spot for establish- 
ing a model farm ; but that's what I'm going to 
do with it. 

We're taking off the surface stone first. 
When that's done, we'll give the tract a dyna- 
miting, cracking and loosening the clay; and 
then we'll go after the rest of the stone with the 
big plows, staying with the job till we've got 
them all, cleaning up as we go. It's likely that 
we'll have to spend a week on each acre in this 
first rough preparation ; but we'll have the land 
smooth and fine and the subsoil in perfect con- 
dition for the work ahead. In a month from 
now those four acres will be in better form than 
any others on the farm. The old wash will be 
stopped and we'll have a firm foundation for 
the trial of our idea. 

We'll spread upon the tract all the manure 
and litter we're able to work into the soil, turn- 



240 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

ing it deep, going over it again and again, 
making ready against autumn. In November 
we'll replace the apple trees whose growth has 
been stunted, adding a few more of choice va- 
rieties. The vineyard, too, will be enlarged by 
half. That will leave two acres for other use, 
besides what we now have in garden stuff. 

On one acre we'll grow our potatoes; the 
other will be our seed-corn plot. On that acre 
everything we know of good corn culture will 
be practiced to the letter and without stint, up 
to the very limit — selection, testing, prepara- 
tion of seedbed, planting and care. All 
through the year every step will be taken as we 
know it ought to be taken. We'll work for 
high quality and for maximum yield, too. All 
that good care can do will be done for every 
square rod of that acre, and for all the rest of 
the model patch. What's more, that patch will 
be kept up in appearance to the dress-parade 
notch. 

The object? Well, partly we want to find 
out what an acre of our land may be forced to 
do with all the conditions right; but mostly 
we want to set the pace on these acres for the 
whole farm. If by right methods we can make 
our own demonstration acre give us one hun- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 241 

dred and fifty bushels of corn — and that's 
what I'm bent upon two years hence — then 
we'll have no excuse for failing to key our 
larger fields up to the same mark. We'll get 
good discipline out of that trial tract in hold- 
ing ourselves up to the best that's in us; and 
we'll find out what's in the land. 

Understand, we're not planning to do any- 
thing extravagant or faddish on our model 
acres. That's to be practical farming, as prac- 
tical as any we're doing, and carefully guarded 
against everything that wouldn't be likely to 
pay on the larger scale of the fields. It's to 
be a "show" spot; that's true; but we'll be 
showing ourselves. 

Don't you think that's a good idea? I'm 
stuck on it. If on those four acres we can 
keep things from going slack — keep all at high 
tension — I believe the example we set our- 
selves will be infectious. I think we'll catch it. 

I've let this run over till Sunday evening. 
We've had a fine day at Happy Hollow — just 
our own folks. It's a long time since a Sunday 
has passed without somebody coming over the 
hill from town for a visit. It was too hot to- 
day; so we just loafed around the house by 
ourselves, having a quiet dinner, reading a lit- 



242 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

tie, talking a little, playing with Peggy and 
Betty. Haven't I told you about Betty? 
She's a year and a half old ; a gay-hearted wee 
one, full of rollicky humors. She certainly 
does keep things stirred up ! I don't know how 
we ever managed to get along without her. 

By and by, toward the cool of evening, 
Laura and I went across the farm to the home 
of some new neighbors. They came here from 
Texas, and they're good people. We sat with 
them and talked for an hour or so, and inevi- 
tably the talk turned to matters of the farm. 
Their place lies beside ours; it's in the rough, 
as ours was six years ago; their problems are 
ours right over again. It's not an easy thing 
they've set out to do. 

They know it, too, but they're not looking 
for the easy thing ; if they were, they'd be bad- 
tempered, peevish, complaining — you know 
what sour dispositions the easy-thing hunters 
always have. These people have been on their 
land for eight months or such a matter, and 
they act just as if they were having no end of 
a good time. Presently they began to joke 
about their misadventures, and then we told 
some jokes on ourselves, and then they told 
some more. Listening, you'd have thought 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 243 

that the work of making a farm out of a piece 
of wilderness is nothing but a riotous jest. 

But the talk carried a serious undernote, for 
all the surface lightness. Those folks are doing 
some thinking. There's an unfailing sign we 
found in them: They've learned something 
besides discouragement from their mistakes. 
They've learned some things that might hardly 
be learned at all save by making mistakes. 

They've learned the very duplicate of our 
own most invaluable lesson, that farming is a 
waiting game and that the waiting must be 
done thoroughly. They've learned just what 
I've been trying to tell you all through this 
part of the story, that there's no thoroughness 
in any method of farming which seeks only im- 
mediate results and that what the old-timers 
of this country call long chances are really no 
chances at all, but the surest of sure-thing bets. 

It boils down to this : Wouldn't you rather 
stake a big, round dollar on a proposition that's 
certain to give you two for one next year than 
fritter away a dollar's worth of nickels on a 
slot-machine gamble with nothing guaranteed 
but quick action? Apply that to farming, and 
who's taking chances — the man who plays his 



2U HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

dollar safe and sure, or he who plays the nick- 
els against certain odds ? 

I'll have to tell you a story by way of illus- 
trating what the nickel-players are likely to 
come to. It's a story about that same old 
friend of ours — Jake. 

Three years ago Jake tended a little crop of 
his own, up on the hillside — three or four acres 
of corn and a patch of turnips for greens. He 
worked one undersized donkey to a "bull- 
tongue" plow. Of course he stood no show of 
making anything at it. That didn't matter, 
so long as he could come down between whiles 
and cut wood for us. He kept tirelessly cheer- 
ful about it. 

Along in the fall he had ten bushels of corn 
to sell, after he'd put away what he absolutely 
must keep for feeding his donkey through the 
winter. The ten bushels brought him five dol- 
lars. For a week after that, while his money 
lasted, we couldn't get him to do a lick of 
work. Then a traveling circus drifted into 
town, and early on the morning of circus day 
Jake appeared with his ax. 

"We-uns is aimin' to go to the show this 
evenin'," he said; "but I lack twenty cents of 
havin' enough. I want to work for you-uns 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 245 

twenty cents' worth. I wish you'd please tell 
me when IVe done worked that much, so I 
won't lose no time gittin' in." 

Jake never took any foolish long chances. 



XII 

I HATE a poorer opinion of myself than I 
had a week ago. It's on account of those goats. 
I set about trying to sell them to a friend the 
other day. The trial came to nothing; my 
friend was too wise; but it might have suc- 
ceeded, and then I'd have been a traitor to 
friendship. Would you like to think of your- 
self so? 

It came about through a visit to this friend 
at his farm over south of town. He owns a 
beautiful place of four hundred acres on the 
crest of a mountain, overlooking all the earth 
and the kingdoms thereof. He bought it three 
years ago, and he got just what the rest of us 
got who bought around here — a farm in a sad 
state of neglect. There was a run-down apple 
orchard of fifty acres. The fields were mostly 
rough wastes of sassafras bush. If you looked 
at the spot sharply you saw only unkempt 
ugliness ; you would have to throw your mental 
eyes a little out of focus to see the great beauty 

246 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 247 

that was hidden beneath the rough, shabby 
outer coat. My friend is a man of a sort you 
meet sometimes — a poet who has never writ- 
ten a verse, an artist who has never made a 
picture, a prophet whose broad humor won't 
let his prophecies be taken seriously. It was 
the poet and artist and prophet in him that led 
him into buying that great lot of land. But 
it was the practical man in him that made him 
set about making the land into a farm. 

There's no need to tell all of his story. It's 
a duplicate of all the others. He's had the 
strong zest of the homemaker, but that's been 
frosted over more than once by irritating little 
troubles. The labor problem has been for him 
an unending torment. To turn a bunch of 
hired hands loose on four hundred acres, with 
only one man to look after them — well, you 
know about the luck he's had in getting results. 

He's been trying to clear the undergrowths 
from a couple of hundred acres of timber so 
that the land might be seeded for pasture. He's 
had a time of it! As we smoked after dinner 
he told me about it. He wasn't using the 
speech of the poet; his words were short, 
choppy, sizzling hot. 

That's when I made my break. I'm 



248 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

ashamed. I wasn't trying to serve him; I 
guess it was just the rude instinct of self- 
preservation that spoke. 

"Why don't you get some goats to clean up 
your brush?" I asked. In the back of my 
head was a dark purpose. I meant to do that 
man dirt! 

That's as far as I got with it, though. He 
stopped me right there with an emphatic ges- 
ture and a loud snort. 

"Goats!" he exploded. "I've got 'em! I 
had a big herd a while ago, and there are 
twenty-five of 'em left. Mine are the jump- 
less kind — born with stiff knees, or something, 
so they can't jump an inch off the ground. 
Great! Maybe they can't jump; I don't 
know ; but they can certainly bounce, then. If 
I had money enough, I'd like to try making 
a pen of some kind that would hold them in 
— or out. Either way. Goats! And jump- 
less goats! Why, I've seen mine up with the 
buzzards in the treetops." 

That brought on more talk. We talked 
about the discouragements — not in a discour- 
aged way, but trying to figure them out. 

"Sometimes I'm tempted to quit," my friend 
said, "or else to compromise and try to be sat- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 249 

isfied with what I can get. But I won't do 
it! Maybe I shan't get what I want, but it 
won't be because I've slackened up in my ideas. 
There'll be no compromise!" 

That's the way to make a farm. You can 
see that I shouldn't have helped that man a 
mite by putting my goats upon him. If a 
goat isn't a compromise, I don't know what 
you'd call him. 

But here's a point that every farmer must 
face and get used to. Whatever he's aiming 
at, if it's anything worth being called a real 
aim, he'll have to accept compromises and 
nothing else by way of results. If he gets all 
of what he's trying for, that simply means he 
isn't trying hard enough. Purpose must al- 
ways be set ahead of actual achievement. To 
be quite content, smugly satisfied, with results 
is the last and worst compromise of all. That's 
the slowing down of purpose my friend was 
talking about. 

Look here : How can any farmer aif ord to 
be perfectly satisfied with any result, even 
though it break all records, when he doesn't 
know how much better he may do ? Right on 
the face of the proposition, there's no limit to 
possible performance on a bit of good soil. 



250 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

The only thing to do is just to keep right on 
going. 

One of these times the average corn crop of 
the United States will be fifty bushels to the 
acre instead of twenty-six. How do you sup- 
pose that will come about? By means of the 
farmers remaining satisfied with twenty-six? 
Not much! By means of setting the mark at 
fifty bushels? No, sir! We'll raise the aver- 
age to fifty bushels when we all really try with 
all our might to beat a hundred bushels. Do 
you see? 

Nothing in our crop work at Happy Hollow 
has given us any reason to be satisfied save 
that each successive year has marked a step 
ahead. How many more steps ahead — good, 
long steps — may we take before we get to the 
limit of possibilities? You tell me, for I don't 
know. I'm tolerably sure of this, though: 
When my work-time is done, the way will still 
be clear ahead for doing better things than 
anybody has succeeded in doing in my time. 

There's a mocking bird sitting on the very 
tip-top twig of the big wild cherry tree back 
of the house, singing at the very tip-top of his 
voice. He's been at it all this week, from the 
first glimmer of dawn to the last soft glow of 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 251 

dusk. I don't believe he's stopped for five min- 
utes together. He acts just exactly like a bird 
on a tearing spree. He's having a profound 
debauch of song. 

I don't know what it's all about. I wish I 
did. He and his mate hatched a brood of 
youngsters last month in the shelter of a wild 
grapevine that grows over the roof of Peggy's 
playhouse. The little ones learned to fly and 
went their way a couple of weeks ago. Maybe 
this outburst is a riot of thanksgiving that the 
responsibility is past ; or maybe it's a riot of re- 
joicing over a new brood on the way. The 
mother bird is keeping mighty quiet and stick- 
ing mighty close at home. I'm afraid of both- 
ering her by going to look in the nest. I guess 
there isn't anyway for it but to wait and see. 
Whatever the reason, Daddy is having a royal 
good time, up yonder. 

Just at this minute he's mocking the skreek- 
skreek of a block and tackle the men are using 
in lifting the dirt out of a cistern they're dig- 
ging. Five minutes ago you'd have thought 
the yard was full of cawing young crows. He 
can "Bob-White," too, fit to make a quail 
ashamed of his own lack of proficiency. Now 
it's a cardinal, and then a chattering sparrow, 



252 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

and again the thin, treble tweetering of a 
warbler. He's right good at everything he 
tackles. But in the last day or two I've been 
growing suspicious of him. He's so incredibly 
clever with his imitations; his repertory is so 
utterly inexhaustible. I'm beginning to be- 
lieve that most of the time he isn't mocking 
at all, as he pretends, but is just romancing — 
just making it up as he goes along — giving us 
a few genuine imitations and then sticking in a 
lot of stuff of his own and trying to make us 
take it as "something just as good." 

Query: Would that be cheating? Or 
would it ? The question has set me to wonder- 
ing. There are some folks who, if they could 
really prove it on him, would feel a sense of 
disappointment. Since he poses as a mocker, 
they'd want him to mock and mock and do 
nothing else. They'd be for denying him the 
right to any least flicker of originality. Are 
they right? Or are they cheating themselves 
in failing to take him as he is and make the 
best of him? 

I shouldn't wonder if we see a lot of our 
clever planning on the farm go wrong simply 
because we want everything to bend to our no- 
tions and aren't willing to surrender our no- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 253 

tions to the great fixed laws. It's so easy in 
farming to settle into habits of thinking and 
practice, even though one prides himself that 
he's a progressive of the progressives. After 
a while it becomes hard to say what is the real 
thing and what the counterfeit of good 
methods. 

We've made a few mistakes by taking up 
what we thought to be advanced methods and 
persisting in them when we might better have 
let Nature have her own way. Hers is almost 
certainly a more deliberate way than ours; 
but that's most likely to be its chief virtue. 

There's the matter of artificial fertilizer, for 
instance. With a soil so impoverished as ours 
was, we knew it would be a matter of years 
to bring it to normal producing power if we 
stuck to the natural way of returning our crops 
to the land through stock feeding. It seemed 
vastly easier and certainly quicker to doctor 
the soil, giving it at once the elements it lacked 
and so stimulating it to immediate perform- 
ance. Soil chemistry, if you get just a smat- 
tering of it, seems an imposingly exact science. 
You get an analysis or what's called a normal 
soil; then you find out that your own is shy 
about so much potash, and so much phosphoric 



254, HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

acid, and so much nitrogen, and you buy these 
things in sacks, all properly balanced, and ap- 
ply them exactly where the need is indicated. 

There's nothing the matter with the theory, 
as a theory. It needs experience to prove that 
it has certain weaknesses in practice. 

Along at first my garden patch didn't suit 
me in the quantity or quality of some of the 
stuff it gave me. I'd been making garden in 
Nebraska on a black, deep loam that had been 
heavily enriched with tons and tons of manure 
to the acre. It had produced according to its j 

strength. The results gotten down here, com- 
pared with those of earlier times, were far from 
satisfactory. My head lettuces looked pale and 
pindling, and they weren't nearly up to grade 
on the table. I'd always fancied that it would 
take a pretty good gardener to beat me at 
growing head lettuces. In Nebraska I'd had 
'em as big as your hat and as solid as croquet 
balls. The product of the first summer at 
Happy Hollow turned out of the size of eggs 
and of the texture of a wad of paper. 

There wasn't nitrogen enough in the soil; 
that was plain. I bought soda nitrate and be- 
gan to feed my plants as carefully as you'd 
feed a bottle baby. The result was distressing. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 255 

The plants grew, of course ; but they grew into 
tall, lean rods, with just a few drooping leaves 
scattered up and down. The chickens would 
pick at them inquiringly and turn away to eat 
grass. We didn't try to eat them ourselves. 

I tried that feeding, too, with others of the 
vegetables. The tomato vines responded 
pretty well in vigor of growth, but the fruits 
were mostly small and misshapen. The peas 
came along tolerably, but they weren't as good 
as we'd been used to. We had used the last 
winter's wood ashes freely on this plot, along 
with the nitrate ; but our stuff was a long way 
from being up to the mark. 

The trouble was that our soil was dead, as 
dead as though we'd brought it from the bot- 
tom of a well. The vitality had been sapped 
out of it. No normal, living process was going 
on beneath the surface. Decay of old life had 
stopped because there was no old life there to 
decay — and decay must go hand in hand with 
life. I might almost as well have applied my 
soda nitrate upon a bed of brickdust, expect- 
ing it to produce good garden truck. 

The use of chemical fertilizer in such a case 
is just an attempt to make a short cut on Na- 
ture. Instead of getting a successful short 



256 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

cut, we got a short circuit and a "burn-out.'* 
I had to go back to first principles and begin to 
make a real soil. That meant putting organic 
matter into it — manure, and weed-stalks, and 
every sort of litter that would rot. My garden 
rows now don't feel underfoot like stone pave- 
ment. The ground is so mellow that in the 
driest time you might kick into it to your shoe- 
tops. Now it's in form so we may get the bene- 
fits of any commercial fertilizer that's applied. 
In the beginning the use of chemicals was alto- 
gether unprofitable. I'm not sure but that it 
did actual harm. As it is now, that soil turns 
out vegetables equal to any grown anywhere. 
In many ways we have had that hint given 
us at our work — the hint that in order to suc- 
ceed at farming we must be content to take 
Nature as we find her and make the best of 
her and not defeat ourselves by trying to 
defeat her unalterable ends. I think we've 
learned the lesson now. Whenever anything 
is to be undertaken nowadays that's a depar- 
ture from old usage, I like to try first of all 
to find out how Nature is likely to feel about 
it — whether it's consistent with what I know 
of her own behavior, or whether it would work 
contrariwise. There are men through the 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 257 

country here who are bolder. Some seem bold 
enough to try growing bananas or edible sea- 
weed on these rocky Ozark hillsides. Frankly, 
I'm growing more timid rather than bolder 
about radical innovations. A reasonable cau- 
tion has its place in progress, hasn't it? 

Speaking of progress, we're getting some of 
it in the Fayetteville country this year. We've 
fussed about the delays ; but we'll have to stop 
fussing pretty soon and take a fresh grip on 
things if we don't want to be known among 
the neighbors as hard-shelled old-timers. 

A rural life conference was held at the state 
university in June. In point of attendance 
it's said to have beaten any other conference 
of the sort in the United States. It was a 
whizzer! Day after day, right in the middle 
of summer, the farmers gathered for discussion 
of their living problems. They weren't con- 
tent merely to sit and listen to a lot of speech- 
making by distinguished visitors. They were 
interested enough to take part in some high- 
strung disagreements and arguments among 
themselves about this, that and the other. 
That's a mighty good sign. They talked of 
good roads, and improvement of rural schools, 
and better marketing of farm products, and 



258 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

farm credit and such-like as if they were deeply- 
interested. The conference has left a clean, 
wholesome after-taste. It's bound to show 
some of the results we've been hankering for. 
The project was undertaken rather doubt- 
fully; its backers were afraid that folks 
wouldn't care enough about it to turn out more 
than a handful of listless listeners. The farm- 
ers fooled them. 

It isn't only in the first stage of conference 
that the farmers are getting action hereabouts. 
We have something for a sign at our own doors. 
They're making a real road out of the old 
Huntsville trail. 

Do you remember what I told you about how 
that trail struck us when we first drove over it, 
six years ago, coming to look at the farm? It 
stood for one of the ancient ways of travel; it 
was rough and unkempt; picturesque enough, 
but not very serviceable. It was impossible to 
haul a real load over it. 

To be sure, a part of the county road tax 
was spent upon it once in a while, in that queer 
way which used to be called "improvement." 
You know what that amounted to. The road 
would merely be mussed up a little. It was 
the custom for the farmers to gather on the 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 259 

road in summer, after crops were "laid by," 
bring along their teams and their dinners and 
spend a day or two working out their taxes. 
Mostly those days were only occasions for 
meeting and swapping neighborhood gossip. 
One of the workers would be chosen as "boss,'' 
and by fits and starts the crew would plow out 
a ditch or two, throw some rough stone into 
the worst of the chug-holes, and leave it next 
to impassable till the next rain would wash it 
down again. It was a good old style, and good 
for neighborliness, but it didn't help the roads. 
For the last month a big modern grading 
machine has been at work on that old road, a 
gang of huge plows and scrapers pulled by 
gasoline power and managed by a man who 
knows what a real road is and how to make 
one. He's one of the newcomer-farmers of the 
district. The road has been changed till its 
own mother wouldn't know it. Deep ditches 
have been run along the sides, run on such 
lines that they'll carry off the water in a heavy 
rain instead of letting it collect in puddles and 
boggy places. The earth from the ditches has 
been thrown up and rounded off in the center ; 
it's been scraped and rolled, and scraped and 
rolled again. Extra crews were kept at work 



260 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

picking up and throwing out the stone. The 
job took about a week to the mile, but when it 
was finished it looked as if it had been newly 
barbered and manicured. We can drive over 
the Huntsville trail now with our eyes shut; 
and next winter if a farmer wants to go to 
town from out here all he'll need to do will be 
to hitch up and go. Lots of times in past win- 
ters we've stayed at home rather than mire 
down on the way in. 

There's something doing, too, in the country 
school district just north of Happy Hollow. 
Until lately that has been a quiet country set- 
tlement whose people went about their affairs 
pretty much in the old way, taking things as 
they came, doing no agitating, not getting 
ahead very fast. Their life was largely a life 
of traditions. 

A District Improvement Club has been or- 
ganized, its members meeting week after week 
to talk over living problems of farm life. 
Sometimes they've had as many as a hundred 
and fifty farm-folks at their gatherings. 
They've had great good out of it, and the inter- 
est is growing instead of flagging. Contrast 
that with conditions in our own district six 
years ago, when an ungraded school was 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 261 

"kept" for three months in the winter, with a 
teacher paid $25 a month. There was talk of 
discontinuing it altogether as a needless ex- 
pense, for on some days only two or three 
pupils would show up. 

What do you suppose the farmers are dis- 
cussing in the new Improvement Club up 
north? Good roads, of course, and ways and 
means for doing some necessary things; but 
just now the central idea is vocational training 
in the country schools! The subject is being 
discussed, too, not merely fooled with. Be- 
fore we know it these schools will be reorgan- 
ized for real service. 

Besides these more pretentious undertakings 
there are many neighborhood clubs scattered 
round, some of them not formally organized 
but meeting in the farmers' homes in the even- 
ings or on a Sunday afternoon. The truth of 
it is that sentiment for better conditions is sort 
of seething around Fayetteville. 

What has brought the change to pass ? The 
weight of opinion of the newcomers? Well, 
that has helped, of course. Some of these new- 
comers have brought with them a lot of fresh, 
vigorous ideas and an unbounded enthusiasm. 
It's probably true that if the old life hadn't 



262 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

been stirred up by the immigration of the last 
few years these changes would have waited for 
years. A stirring up was badly needed. 

But, when all due credit has been given the 
newcomers, there's a lot left over for the folks 
on the ground. There was nothing the matter 
with them save that they had lacked just the 
right impulse to get things a-going. It would 
have been impossible for the strangers to make 
actual headway with their undertakings 
against any real antagonism from a majority 
of the older settlers. Some of these of course 
have stoutly opposed the new program ; others 
have been offish outwardly at first till they 
could find out what was what, but at heart they 
weren't set against better conditions. Most of 
them have desired better conditions as ardently 
as anybody could ; but long usage in any coun- 
try hardens into habit, and the habit isn't easily 
broken till something comes along from out- 
side to interrupt it. It simply hadn't occurred 
to these people that they might actually do the 
things they wanted done. They didn't quite 
know how to go about it. 

That's the part the strangers have played, 
once the older settlers got to know them and 
found that they were to be trusted as friends 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 263 

and neighbors. Enthusiasm, too, was a little 
lacking — enthusiasm and not desire. 

Enthusiasm! There's a fine, strong word, 
standing for a great power in this little old life 
of ours, whether in town or country. The 
more I think of it, the more I'm persuaded that 
the flow of youth from the farms to the towns 
in recent years has had its source, not in dis- 
content with country hardships, not in any 
morbid desire for excitement, but for the most 
part in a limitless enthusiasm which sought 
room for expression according to its strength. 

Now the enthusiasm is coming back to the 
farms; for under the new order it can have a 
better chance on the farms than of old. Farm 
life has become a great life, and it will be 
greater still beyond compare in the years 
ahead. 

That won't be altogether on account of out- 
ward changes in farm conditions. Scientific 
methods in crop production, scientific farm 
management, improved marketing facilities — 
all such things are agencies, but they'd be next 
to valueless without the fire of human enthusi- 
asm to give them life and meaning. 

That's what we're getting on the farms in 
these days. 



XIII 

Did anybody ever entice you into trying to 
figure yourself rich at the chicken business? 
If not, then you're the hundredth man. Even 
if you aren't thinking seriously of going into 
chickens, you really ought to try that figuring 
sometime, just for the education you'll get out 
of it. 

Come on, now; get out paper and pencil. 
You won't need much paper. The back of an 
old envelope will do, if you crowd the lines up 
a little. It isn't at all a long job. 

You begin with just one hen. That's all 
you'll need for a starter. Most Ukely your 
ideas are more liberal than that. Perhaps that 
sort of a beginning strikes you as too trifling 
and slow. But just wait till you see what that 
one hen will do for you. She's certainly going 
to surprise you. 

Of course, since the beginning is so modest, 
she'd better be a good hen — one of the two 
hundred-egg kind you read about. She'll be 

^64 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 265 

easy to find. Lots of poultrymen advertise 
that kind of stock for sale. And she won't 
cost much. You'll be able to find a corking 
good hen and a rooster from a pedigreed, 
strong-laying strain — as good birds as any one 
need have as a foundation for a commercial 
poultry business — for a ten-dollar bill. You 
may find cheaper stuff if you wish; but that's 
cheap enough. 

All right. You start with your one hen, 
and she starts laying. If she Hves up to her 
family standard, she'll lay you two hundred 
eggs in the first year. Now you set those eggs. 
This high-grade bird can't hatch them herself, 
for that would interfere with her laying opera- 
tions ; and you can't manage a one-hen egg out- 
put very well with an incubator. That needn't 
bother you, though. You can get a few scrub 
barnyard hens to do the first year's hatching 
and brooding. When that season's work is 
done, you can sell the scrubs off* and begin 
with incubators next year. 

With two hundred eggs, theoretically you 
ought to have two hundred chickens. But not 
all the eggs will hatch; and then besides 
there'll be some losses of young chicks by acci- 
dent and disease. It doesn't do to expect too 



266 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

much. So suppose you get only one hundred 
chicks that will live through to maturity. 
That's fair enough, isn't it? 

Probably half of those chickens will be roost- 
ers ; so you'll have fifty hens for starting your 
second year's work. That's fifty for one. 
With that rate of increase you'll come to the 
beginning of your third year with 2,500 hens. 
You'll have disposed of the cockerels at the 
end of last season, of course, when they 
weighed say an average of six pounds apiece 
— 15,000 pounds. At ten cents a pound that 
would give you $1,500. Income has begun al- 
ready, you see! 

That same fifty-fold increase will give you 
125,000 hens at the end of your third season. 
We're not counting the old hens, you notice; 
we'll leave them out of the reckoning entirely, 
so as not to complicate the figures. By the 
same token, you'll have fifty times as many 
cockerels this year as last, and fifty times as 
much money for them. That's $75,000! 
That's only three years from the start! And 
from just one hen, mind you! And you have 
125,000 hens left for your fourth year's breed- 
ing. . 

At the end of the fourth year you'll have 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 267 

6,250,000 hens and an income of $3,750,000 
from the sale of cockerels ; and your fifth year 
will give you 312,500,000 hens and an income 
from the cockerels of $187,500,000. Still leav- 
ing all old stock out of account, you see ! We 
throw them in for good measure, so nobody 
may charge us with being too visionary. 

From one hen, bought only five years ago! 
Aren't you glad now that you didn't start 
with more? If you'd started with a couple of 
dozen, perhaps the increase would be more 
than you could manage. Yes, one hen is 
enough for a beginning, if she's a hen of the 
right kind. 

No doubt you'll want to stop at the limit of 
your fifth year's flock of 312,500,000 hens. 
That's as many hens as you'll feel like caring 
for. In fact, you'll have to stop there; for if 
you had a fifty-fold increase in your sixth year 
you'd have 15,625,000,000 hens. You see 
where the trouble would start then. If you 
fed each hen only a bushel of grain in a year, 
your flock would eat up about four times as 
much wheat and corn and oats and other grains 
as all the farms of the United States produce. 
That would be awkward. Never mind. Sup- 
pose you do have to stop there and just main- 



268 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

tain what you've got ; your income will be more 
than you can possibly spend, provided you con- 
tinue to give some of your time to a personal 
attention to the business. Indeed, I shouldn't 
wonder if you'd be willing to retire pretty soon 
— say by the end of your tenth year, and give 
yourself up to a good time for the rest of your 
days. 

Is that absurd? Where's the absurdity? 
It's a matter of plain, simple arithmetic. 
There are the figures, truth-telling, confidence- 
compelling. Right on its face, that proposi- 
tion is a lot more reasonable than some others 
I've read in advertising addressed to back-to- 
the-landers. 

No, there's no flaw at all in the logic of this 
calculation — until you run it out to its logical 
conclusion. Then it's absurd enough to satisfy 
anybody. 

What makes it hard to understand is the 
fact that lots and lots of people — hundreds and 
thousands of them — ^have actually started 
chicken-raising with one hen as a beginning 
and have actually come to the beginning of 
their second year with fifty hens as increase. 
But nobody on earth, since the beginning of 
chicken-raising, has ever carried the matter 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 269 

through at that rate for five years, nor four, 
nor three. Maybe somebody has done it for 
two years, but I've never heard of him; have 
you? Be careful, now! Did you ever know of 
a flock of 2,500 hens that had been bred and 
reared in two years' time from one original 
mother? You'll have to show me! 

What's the answer? If that program is 
practicable for one year, why isn't it just as 
practicable for two years, or for three? We 
came to Happy Hollow with two dozen or 
more hens six years ago — fine, strong stock, 
as good as the best. Why isn't the Fayette- 
ville country literally overrun by their in- 
crease? How does it happen that there isn't 
some time, somewhere, a freak exhibition of 
the possibilities of that indisputable capacity 
for increase? If it is theoretically possible in 
six years for one little old hen to produce 15,- 
625,000,000 female descendants,. wouldn't you 
think that all the hens in the country, working 
all together for century after century, might 
arrive at something like that grand total after 
a while ? 

Now that we're started on the arithmetic of 
it and are talking about logical conclusions, we 



270 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

might as well let out a few notches more, just 
for fun. 

If the increase of that one solitary hen were 
continued at that rate for ten years, the end of 
the tenth season would give us 488,281,250,- 
000,000,000 hens, not to say a word about the 
roosters. That would be about 500,000,000 
hens apiece for every man, woman and child in 
the United States. And yet there are folks 
who talk gloomily about an early impending 
shortage of foodstuffs in the world! Why, 
every one of us would have to eat 57,077 hens 
an hour for every blessed hour, day and night, 
through the whole year in order to eat up his 
share. We couldn't do it. Besides, what 
should we do with those roosters ? And as for 
the eggs 

Shucks! What's the use of acting the fool 
like this? Let's talk sense. You may not 
think it, but I had a sensible idea in the back 
of my head when I started this foolishness. 

If you've followed me carefully, perhaps I 
needn't say that the chicken business isn't what 
it's cracked up to be — that the practice doesn't 
come out at all like the theory. Every one who 
has tried it has found that out. It seems some- 
how inevitable that everybody whose thoughts 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 271 

turn toward the land for a livelihood gets to 
thinking about chickens as affording the safest, 
surest and quickest route to success. Yet it 
isn't often that you hear of anybody making a 
fortune out of chickens, nor even a decent liv- 
ing. There must be a screw loose somewhere. 

It isn't hard to find — in practice. The fac- 
tor that's the most fascinating of all, when 
you're working with paper and pencil, is the 
very factor that defeats you when you get to 
working with hens. A flock of poultry does in 
fact increase at an almost unbelievable ratio; 
the increase is so rapid that the poultryman, 
if he's just an unskilled amateur, can't possibly 
keep up with it. It overwhelms him, throws 
him into hopeless confusion; and before he's 
able to bring order out of the chaos he finds 
himself involved in losses he couldn't foresee 
and can't afford to bear. So, plumb discour- 
aged, he sells out and quits. I dare say that's 
been the history of ninety-nine out of every 
hundred ventures in commercial poultry rais- 
ing. 

The facts are that a farm flock of forty or 
fifty good hens or thereabouts, if given good 
farm care and kept down to that number, is 
usually highly profitable. A flock of a thou- 



272 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

sand good hens under good management by a 
skilled poultryman who will give the necessary 
time to it has been proved profitable; and of 
course that number may be increased with an 
increase of facilities for care. But between the 
small flock for farm use and the commercial 
flock of a thousand birds lies a gap that isn't 
often crossed. Somewhere between the two 
extremes every adventurer almost certainly 
comes to a point where for a time losses must 
overbalance income. Unless he's uncannily 
long-headed, or unless he can command the 
help of some one who's been through it and 
knows, he'll be quite unable to see through the 
maze of confusion. 

We had a fine flock when we came to Happy 
Hollow. That small flock had always paid 
handsomely. We knew how to handle the 
birds, how to feed for results, how to select for 
breeding, and all the intimate details of suc- 
cessful care. We hadn't tried to build up a 
large commercial flock at home in Nebraska 
simply because we hadn't room enough. But 
we had had it in our minds for years as a most 
fetching possibility. When we found ourselves 
actually owning a big farm, that vision quick- 
ened. Discounting and discounting again 



r--^ 




^'^^'^-■^^ 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 273 

for every possible emergency, and then cutting 
the resulting figures in two and dividing again 
by half, we couldn't for the life of us find any 
good reason why there shouldn't be good 
money in commercial poultry farming. We 
went at it in our second year. 

We didn't plunge. We didn't try to force 
the pace at all at the beginning. The best of 
our stock was used for the breeding pens, and 
our eggs were strongly fertile. We had a 
one hundred and forty-egg incubator, and this 
was filled a second time so soon as the first 
hatch was off. As our supply of good eggs 
was larger than the incubator's capacity, we 
supplemented its work by setting hens on good 
clutches at the same time, so that the chicks 
might be brooded and tended all together. 

Our hatches were excellent, and our losses 
after hatching were very small. Of course the 
year's work didn't show anything like a fifty- 
fold increase in the number of hens used in 
breeding, but the increase was very satisfac- 
tory. After a rigid culling out, we went into 
the next year with about two hundred hens fit 
for use in the pens. We didn't use all of 
them, but selected again, taking only the best ; 
and again the hatches were fine. By mid- 



274 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

summer our yards held about five hundred 
hens and growing pullets. There had 
been no accidents worth mentioning, and 
the percentage of loss had been very small. 
So far as increase was concerned, we had every 
reason to be satisfied. Another year would 
easily give us a flock of a thousand hens. From 
that point almost anybody would have read his 
title clear — on paper. 

But we stopped with the five hundred and 
then began to cut down the number till we had 
got back to a flock just about large enough for 
our own table needs. We've stayed at that 
point since. We had found out that we were 
up against a big undertaking. If we had 
stayed with it for another year we couldn't 
by any chance have missed losing. 

The solemn truth is that hatching chickens is 
merely a detail of the chicken business. We 
had no trouble at all with that part of it, nor 
with bringing the hatches through to maturity. 
The difficulty was quite aside from that. 

It seems inexcusable, looking back over it; 
but we hadn't figured on the very obvious fact 
that it must take a lot of time to give proper 
care to a thousand hens. A flock of two or 
three dozen made no great demand; that was 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 275 

just one of the morning and evening chores, 
and soon over with. While the hatches were 
small, the brooders might be kept in the house- 
yard, right under our eyes, where they could 
have continual oversight without making us 
realize that we were giving much time to them. 
The hen houses we had built at the beginning 
were roomy and comfortable enough for shel- 
tering several times as many as we started 
with, and the yards we had first enclosed were 
equally roomy. Feeding cost had never been 
a considerable item, either, when we had only 
the domestic flock; table scraps and kitchen 
refuse went a long way toward disposing of 
that. 

During our five hundred-hen summer we 
discovered the diff'erence. We found that a 
flock of that size could hardly be made to pay 
because it wasn't large enough to justify either 
of us in giving it the undivided time and at- 
tention it must have if it were to prove a suc- 
cess. Feeding, watering and tending became 
vastly more than a light chore which might be 
delegated to the children. With a barnyard 
flock running around, the loss of a hen or two 
now and then hadn't seemed to amount 
to much, because we hadn't been keeping 



276 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

accounts of profits and losses; but in the 
course of a year that unconsidered leak 
might easily amount to twenty-five per 
cent, of all we had. When we essayed to put 
the business on a commercial footing, and on 
a much magnified scale, plainly those losses 
had to be looked after closely. They couldn't 
be guarded against save by staying right on 
the job, watching for disease, keeping up the 
yards, scoring and sorting out the likehest 
breeders, keeping individual records of per- 
formance. There was a lot to be learned be- 
fore we would be able to do this well. 

We should have to work hard for at least 
two years without any net income, while we 
were getting the business firmly on its feet. 
Had we been situated close to a good consum- 
ing market for our surplus eggs and broilers, 
and able to reach consumers directly, the case 
would have been somewhat better; but Fay- 
etteville, like every other country town I've 
ever known anything about, isn't a profitable 
market for a little jag of farm surplus. Too 
many farmers are going in every day with 
little jags of something or other, accepting 
whatever the middlemen are offering. Our 
surplus wasn't yet great enough so that we 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 277 

could afford to seek a direct and a better mar- 
ket, by advertising or otherwise. Had we had 
plenty of working capital it would have been 
good business to set about making direct con- 
nections, looking to the years to come ; but that 
would have absorbed at least as much as our 
surplus would bring us. There must be noth- 
ing haphazard in the marketing, if profits were 
to be realized. That preparation would have 
taken a great deal of time, too ; and more time 
would have to be spent in keeping records, in 
studying good methods, and generally in put- 
ting the business on a business basis. Yes, one 
of us would have to give all his time to the hens 
for two years without any net profit. 

And a considerable working capital was de- 
manded for other things than advertising and 
making our market. We hadn't forecast how 
large an investment we should be called upon 
to make in feed. Though our small farm flock 
had cost next to nothing in that way, we should 
have to feed grain worth $500 or more in ma- 
turing our five hundred pullets and carrying 
them over to the next season. We hadn't so 
much money right then that we felt was avail- 
able for that use. 

And there was the matter of housing. In 



278 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

getting ready for a thousand hens, we should 
have to increase our housing capacity many 
fold to accommodate the breeders and the 
broiler hatches. That would call for another 
$500 at least. 

Plainly, instead of our original small yard 
we should have to devote at least twenty acres 
to our flock for yards and range ; and besides, 
with a thousand hens to be fed and their 
hatches to be prepared for market, all the rest 
of the farm would have to be given up to the 
production of chicken feed. The twenty acres 
of range and yards would have to be fenced 
and cross-fenced, and the business would call 
for an investment in incubators and brooders 
and other equipment. Then, as in any other 
business whose management was fit to be called 
intelligent, we ought to have a moderate cash 
capital for operation. Without it we should 
be running into unforeseen snags. 

So, you see, if we were going into chicken- 
raising on a commercial scale and on a safe 
basis that would justify us in expecting good 
profits, we must make a very substantial in- 
vestment. In addition to what we had in the 
land, we should need $3,000 or $3,500 — maybe 
more — to get the business a-going. We hadn't 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 279 

so much money to give to it ; and so we backed 
down while the backing was good. 

Have we abandoned the chicken idea? We 
have not. We got into it far enough to see 
clearly that with an adequate investment and 
right attention commercial poultry-raising 
might be made to pay well, perhaps better than 
anything else we might undertake on an equal 
capital and with an equal use of time. Next 
year we shall go into it again, and this time 
we'll go to stay. With our earlier experience 
to help us, letting us understand the strong 
and the weak points in the proposition, we can't 
see failure in it. 

We shall start moderately, it's true ; but our 
start won't be made with a dozen hens and a 
rooster. We shall contrive to skip over that 
disheartening half-way-between year of no 
profits. We don't want to spend another year 
in taking care of four or five hundred hens 
when we can see that that is a needless loss 
of time and patience and money. We shall 
begin next time with breeding flocks of 
one hundred hens so we may jump over 
the troublesome time and come at once in 
our second year to a commercial flock of 
1,000 or 1,200. Then we'll have something. 



280 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

We'll go into it with money enough in hand to 
see us through, so we may put some "pep" into 
the marketing of our stuff; and from that 
foundation we shall build as large a business 
as we are able to take care of. 

I've been running on quite a bit about chick- 
ens. I've done it on purpose, because I have 
never seen just this statement of the matter in 
print, and because a fair understanding may 
save other folks many a disappointment. 

Here's the way it stands, as we see it: If 
you're figuring on the chicken business, don't 
waste time in figuring over the fabulous rate 
of increase that's theoretically possible. If 
you'll make right provision for it, increase will 
come fast enough. That will be the least of 
your frets. If you don't make right provision, 
well in advance of the actual increase, you'll 
be doomed to failure. 

Figure carefully on practical ways and 
means, and not at all on the fairy-story end of 
things. Then you'll be reasonably certain to 
win. 

A couple of years ago I was down South, 
riding through an isolated farming district that 
lay far from railway. One day I stopped for 
dinner at a farmhouse, and of course we talked 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 281 

farming over the meal. The farmer's family 
was living in most uncommon comfort; the 
farm produced just about everything that was 
needed. Remoteness from market towns 
rather compelled that. There was a fine gar- 
den, plenty of fruit, turkeys, geese, ducks, hens, 
pigs, cows and mules, well fed and sleek. 

Out beside the house was a little patch of 
Spanish peanuts, half the size of a small town 
lot. The farmer told me the nuts would be 
used in fattening the pigs he would have for his 
own meat supply. 

"How many pigs will that patch fatten?" I 
asked. 

"Oh," he said easily, "them'll fat up a right 
smart of hawgs." 

"Have you any idea how many pounds of 
pork a patch like that will make?" I persisted. 

"Oh," he said, "it'll make quite a consid'ble 
meat." 

But I was after information. "See here," I 
said: "Suppose you had forty acres in a crop 
of peanuts like that, how many hogs could you 
carry on the crop?" 

The question seemed to paralyze him for a 
minute. "Fohty acres?" he said. "Fohty 
acres ! In peanuts ? Why, man, dear 1 Fohty 



282 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

acres in peanuts would fat all the hawgs they 
is in the world!" 

That's something of the unealculating state 
of mind in which many of us approach the 
chicken business. It takes so little to feed one 
hen! If she's put to it she can rustle a living 
for herself, without a cent of cost. Well, just 
multiply that trifle a thousand times, and there 
you are ! Doesn't it sound easy ? Not once in 
a hundred times is any real thought given to 
the business end. 

I should say that that easy spirit is account- 
able for nine-tenths of the failures met by 
townsmen who go at farming. They have such 
a supreme confidence in Nature's vast generosi- 
ties ! They can't find any good reason why Na- 
ture should be stingy. A patch of ground, a 
few seeds, a hoe — and then fat abundance: 
That's the usual mental formula. 

But that won't work. It's ridiculous to ex- 
pect success to blow in upon a chance wind. 
Whether in dairying, or seed-breeding, or meat 
production, or chicken raising, or any other 
branch of farm industry, success simply will 
not come to reward free and easy, hit or miss 
methods. 

We've had some of that to learn at Happy 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 283 

Hollow, and the learning hasn't been alto- 
gether easy. Sometimes, when things are go- 
ing right, there comes over us a sense of hearty 
well-being that prompts us to open our hands 
and relax our minds. Maybe you know the 
feeling — a sort of assurance that Providence 
must certainly be helping to take care of you, 
and that you needn't worry. Those are the 
times when disaster is most likely to get in its 
work. 

A banker doesn't grow genially lax and be- 
gin to make careless loans just because he's 
had a prosperous year. If he's a good banker, 
he'll take a hunch from that prosperity, tighten 
the lines, buckle his mind to his work, and so 
make himself a better business man than be- 
fore. 

Well, that's farming, too. That's just the 
temper the farmer needs to cultivate with all 
the genius he has. Successful farming is suc- 
cessful business — ^that's all. 



XIV 

Does our farming pay? It's hard for us to 
put sentiment aside in considering the ques- 
tion. When we talk things over between our- 
selves, Laura and I, sentiment is never left 
out; for to us that is the substance of what 
we're doing. It's no more than fair to you, 
though, that we should get right down to hard, 
practical bedrock for a while and "talk 
turkey." The veriest sentimentalist on earth 
must have something to eat now and then. 
Maybe having three square meals a day makes 
him all the better sentimentalist. Our home 
at Happy Hollow would be a queer sort of 
place if the storerooms and pantries and cel- 
lars were empty. It's practical farming that 
keeps them full. 

So let's try to stick to the very practical 
question of the farm and what it's giving us 
that's good to eat and fit to wear and meant for 
tangible enjoyment. Sooner or later we must 
come down to that; for if the farm isn't able 

284 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 285 

to feed us and clothe us and make us comfor- 
table, then there would be no particular use in 
all this writing about it. If Happy Hollow 
isn't paying its way, then it's just a luxury 
such as anybody might enjoy if he had the 
price, and I'd be deluding you by trying to 
make it appear that it's anything else. The 
fact that we've made a delightful home of it 
wouldn't be enough to distinguish it ; for there 
are many happy homes. Yes, we must sum up 
the matter of farming for a living and the re- 
turns in dollars and cents. 

The farm is giving us a good living. That 
would better be said plainly and in few words. 
Any day in the year we can set our table abun- 
dantly with what our own land has produced. 
Always there is plenty for our own needs and 
for the pleasure of our friends. No prince of 
the blood could fare better, for we have just 
what we want to make us perfectly satisfied. 
What we have is all so good that it couldn't be 
any better. It comes to our table from within 
arm's reach of our own doors, and everything 
is of the best of its kind. 

I don't know how to express that by writing 
a dollar mark with a row of figures after it. 
If we were buying in the markets what we get 



286 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

from our garden and vineyard, from our pas- 
tures and dairy-barn and hen yards for our 
own table, we'd have to pay $1,000 or $1,200 a 
year for it. It comes so easily and so naturally, 
just when we want it, a basketful or a pailful 
or an armful, that we're very apt to overlook 
its value; but it amounts to a good snug sum 
in the course of a year. Besides, there's always 
a surplus. Some of this surplus we sell. 
Maybe if we were as thrifty as we ought to be 
we'd sell it all. But it's a pleasure to have 
some of it to give away, to be able to send a 
basket of asparagus or grapes, or a roll of 
sweet butter, or a side of sugar-cured bacon 
to somebody we've taken a shine to. We can't 
keep track of that, because it has no equivalent 
in coin. It won't do to call that a mere in- 
dulgence. Friendship isn't a luxury; it's a 
necessity. We had no such way of showing 
friendliness when we lived in town. If you're 
able to write that out in figures, you have me 
beaten. 

However you compute it, with every charge 
made against it that the greatest stickler of an 
accountant could devise, the cost of doing all 
this is so little that it's never felt. The return 
is great. There is just no chance for a dispute 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 287 

as to whether that part of our farming pays 
and pays well. A small corner of the farm, 
and a few acres of uncultivated land used as 
pasture, supply our table. We*re living more 
comfortably than we ever lived before. 

That might not happen so for everybody. 
In all probability it wouldn't happen so if the 
householder were not something of a manager. 
The difference between low cost and high cost, 
in furnishing the farm table, lies altogether in 
management. When there's work to be done 
in the garden, we plan always to have it done 
at a time when the work horses are idle for an 
hour or so and when we can squeeze in the labor 
of one of the hands who would otherwise be 
hanging on the side-lines. In the course of a 
season we cut out considerable waste of time 
in that way. The saving amounts to a great 
deal. No matter how carefully the farmer 
plans, he'll be bound to have some gaps of time 
in his heavy field work now and then; gaps of 
hours that run into days. 

Maybe the cultivator has been at work in 
the morning on the new-ground corn, with an 
extra hand following the machine with a grub- 
bing-hoe, cutting out the loosened roots of the 
old growths. And maybe there's an interval 



288 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

of an hour or so after dinner while the machine 
is being overhauled or a broken strap of the 
harness mended. The extra hand would like it 
first-rate if he might spend that hour squatting 
on his heels in the shade, dozing. The loss in 
his wages for that hour wouldn't be much — 
only ten or fifteen cents ; but we don't like loaf- 
ing in the middle of a summer day. I like to 
watch for those chances. If I can get the idler 
to hitch a mule to a garden tool and clean out 
a few rows of potatoes, or run through the 
sweet corn patch, or attend to some other little 
job like that, it sets us definitely ahead. It 
isn't often in summer that we'd like to have a 
man and team spend a whole day straight on 
the garden while the fields wait. If the garden 
work of midsummer isn't done in odd hours, 
it's very likely to be neglected altogether. 
Time after time those short catch-as-catch-can 
jobs have "made" a potato crop for us or saved 
some other crop in the garden from ruin. 

So you'll understand what I mean in saying 
that the actual cost of getting our own stuff to 
our own table is almost nothing. If we failed 
to keep an eye on these small turns and tricks 
— as most farmers do fail — the cost might be 
multiplied many times over. But for that sav- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 289 

ing feature of management, in all probability 
our verdict as to the wisdom of kitchen-gar- 
dening on the farm would be very unlike our 
feeling of to-day. A neglected garden is 
hardly better than none; yet care ought not be 
given it regardless of cost. With that in mind 
weVe kept our truck patches clustered close 
about the barn and stable, so they're handy to 
get at with tools and beasts, and so it's always 
possible to make good use of a chance load of 
manure which might go to waste if we waited 
to haul it to a far field. 

The dairy barn, too, is a constant invitation 
to the study of many little economies whose 
sum is large. There's the matter of late sum- 
mer and early fall pasture, for instance. In 
most parts of the South pasture for the cows 
becomes a problem in July, August and Sep- 
tember, which is our hot, dry season. Most 
southern farmers are able to keep up milk yield 
in those months only by a free use of mill feeds 
at high cost. The cost is often so great as to 
absorb all profits ; so it's not uncommon to see 
the cows prematurely dried in summer and 
turned out to pick a bare living on such weeds 
and roughage as they're able to find for them- 
selves. Then through the fall and winter 



290 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

there's often no milk or butter on the farm- 
house tables. 

That looks like poor business, doesn't it? 
With a little planning all expensive summer 
feeding may be done away with. Even if the 
farmer isn't able to afford a summer silo he 
may save himself by a bit of contriving. 

It happens that we have at Happy Hollow 
in this midsummer quite a likely bunch of 
young cows and heifers and lately weaned 
calves. Up to this time there has been plenty 
of good grass and clover pasture, but in an- 
other week or ten days we shall have to think 
about other feed. There are more animals in 
the lot than we need for farm use. Most farm- 
ers in this fix would sell off the surplus; in- 
deed, that's just what the neighbors are doing. 
The desire to sell has struck them all at once, 
so that the speculators are able to beat down 
prices several notches below real values. If 
we can carry our animals over the next month 
or six weeks cheaply and have some good milk 
animals to offer when the fall rains start and 
the fall pastures freshen it will mean a good 
many dollars to us. 

We prepared for this emergency a month 
ago, making a thick sowing of amber sorghum 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 291 

after oats harvest on a couple of acres lying 
just over the fence from the barn lots, timing 
the sowing so we would have the cane ready- 
to feed by mid-July. The land was heavily 
manured, and with only a month's growth the 
sorghum is now shoulder-high, rank as a tropi- 
cal jungle. If it were cut now it would give 
us five or six tons of cured hay to the acre; 
cut and fed green and fresh it will carry our 
cattle abundantly till the first frosts come. The 
value of the manure we get will much more 
than pay the cost of preparing and seeding the 
land, so we get the feeding value of the crop 
for nothing but the little labor of throwing it 
over the fence. 

That cane crop as it stands is a living proof 
of the value of manure applied to these worn 
soils. The dressing was applied heavily while 
our supply lasted ; but the supply gave out be- 
fore the whole of the patch was covered. You 
can see the difference with both eyes tied be- 
hind you. Only one good rain has fallen since 
the seeding was done. The dressed part of the 
land is to-day mellow and moist; the cane 
standing there is rich, thick-stemmed, dark- 
leaved and drips juice when it's cut. The strip 
through the middle of the field that had no 



292 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

manuring is baked hard, and the cane there is 
only shoe-top high, the leaves saffron-hued, the 
stems no thicker than lead pencils and appear- 
ing just about as succulent as an old tooth- 
brush. With every condition in its favor for 
the rest of the season it will give no more than 
a ton of hay to the acre; probably the yield 
will be only half a ton. 

On one of our oats fields there is some stone 
left which we want to haul off this summer; 
so we didn't follow the oats with peas as on the 
rest of the small grain land. Those five or six 
acres promised to lie fallow for the remainder 
of the year; but now there's a fine volunteer 
crop of crabgrass and Japanese clover coming 
on. We're running a line of fence across one 
side, to cut the patch off from the cornfields — 
and there's excellent pasturage for the horses, 
enough to carry them well till the beginning of 
winter. 

All this means of course that the permanent 
pastures will be left to restore themselves for 
late fall use. They'll be greatly improved by 
the rest, and the stock will thrive all the better 
for the change. The ultimate cost of doing 
these things is just the cost of a couple of days 
labor; the profits can't be exactly estimated, 



I 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 293 

but they'll run up in one way and another to 
many dollars. Best of all, our pigs will be 
thriving on a part of that sorghum for next 
winter's meat, and for the rest of the year our 
milk and cream and butter will cost us nothing 
but the labor of caring for the animals while 
most of our farmer neighbors are going with- 
out. 

You can see that there's nothing extraordi- 
nary in any of this. We've had no circum- 
stances in our favor save as we've taken hold 
and molded them to our needs. There isn't a 
farm in the country on which this sort of man- 
agement might not be followed — just a careful, 
timely stroke that's thought out long enough 
beforehand to give it full value. As a matter 
of fact, though, I don't know of one farm 
around Happy Hollow that's having such man- 
agement. I haven't seen another farm in the 
neighborhood that has provided even a little 
iforage-patch. 

That isn't a showy sort of management. 
Even a practical farmer would be apt to un- 
derestimate its worth if he had never tried the 
stop-gap system in his own work. He'd de- 
ceive himself by figuring the money value of 
the small batches of stuff grown in that way 



294 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

instead of the value of the service they render 
— which of course is the true value on the farm. 
The cash-crop idea is all right till it becomes 
an obsession ; but too close devotion to it leads 
many a farmer to miss many an opportunity 
for getting ahead. The measure of value of 
that sorghum patch isn't at all the price we 
might get for the hay if we cut and cured and 
sold it in the market, but rather what it will 
save us by conserving our pastures and mak- 
ing it unnecessary for us to sacrifice valuable 
stock. 

You'll see how difficult it is to write down 
the profits of such operations in dollars and 
cents. What's it worth in dollars and cents to 
have brimming pailfuls of rich fresh milk, 
night and morning, all through July and Au- 
gust and September, just at the time of year 
when it's most needed for health's sake? I 
can't cipher it out. There are many degrees of 
living, and none is too good if it insures health 
and comfort. The best doesn't often depend 
upon the amount of money spent in getting it, 
but far oftener upon a little good care. 

A few days ago I visited a farmhouse down 
the road and saw an eight-months-old baby sit- 
ting on the floor sucking hungrily at a chunk 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 295 

of pork. There was no milk for it, because the 
cow had been sold, because there wasn't any- 
thing to feed it, because the farmer hadn't 
planned by a couple of hours' work in June to 
meet this unfailing midsummer condition. The 
farmer's wife said the baby was "right puny, 
this hot weather," and it looked the part. 

Well, anyway, to get back to the practical 
question, I know perfectly well that this stop- 
gap method of doing things in garden and barn 
and feed-lot is enabling us to live and to live 
well on no money outlay at all. You may say 
if you like that that's contrary to all reason; 
but it's true. True things needn't necessarily 
gee with what we think is reasonable. Nothing 
seems reasonable till we've grown more or less 
accustomed to it. But there's the fact. Our 
table is supplied through careful little savings 
in time which, but for this practice, must be 
sheer wastes. We have no loafing hours in our 
work days. If field work stops for any reason 
at any time, we make it a point always to find 
something to do that will make our living con- 
ditions better and help to keep our living costs 
at zero. Lean back in your chair for a minute 
now and see if that proposition doesn't clear 
itself up for you. 



296 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

That leaves the field work to be talked about 
— that part of the work which most of us think 
about when farming is mentioned. Since we're 
calling this a farm, we ought to be able to ac- 
count for what the fields are doing. That's 
fair enough; for running a farm as large as 
ours doesn't consist merely in supplying the 
house table. That may be done on only a few 
acres ; but we have a hundred and twenty acres 
in the farm. If the big end isn't paying, then 
it's a case of the tail wagging the dog — freak 
business. 

We have sixty acres of the farm well cleaned 
up and in a fine state of cultivation, besides 
twenty acres in partly timbered pasture — a 
pasture with a brook on either side, and the 
fields between. Ten acres of the sixty is in 
park, lawn, garden, orchard, house grounds, 
barnyard and feeding lots. That leaves fifty 
acres actually devoted to field crops. 

From that fifty acres we shall get this year, 
after deducting enough to pay labor cost, 
about three hundred bushels of wheat, four 
hundred of oats, eight hundred of corn, sixty 
to seventy-five tons of cowpea and sorghum 
hay, ten or twelve tons of straw, and perhaps 
twenty tons of corn fodder that will be cut and 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 297 

stored for feeding. About as much more fod- 
der will be pastured in the fields ; and we shall 
have no end of second-growth peavines for 
pasturage. Suppose we throw in that pasture 
part; we'd have to guess at its money value, 
anyway. Suppose we count only the harvested 
crops. 

Most of the farmers around us have been 
used to selling so soon as they could manage 
it after harvest. Usually they need the money ; 
but, if they weren't impelled by necessity to 
sell, they haven't enough storage room for put- 
ting by anything beyond their own farm needs. 

If we intended to sell what we've grown, we 
should hold until December 1 or later when 
the depression of harvest time is past and re- 
covery of prices is under way. Judging from 
the past, about December 1 our wheat will be 
worth in the local markets approximately 
ninety cents a bushel, our oats forty cents, our 
corn seventy cents, our hay fifteen dollars a 
ton, and our straw five or six dollars. There 
isn't a market price on the corn fodder, 
as no one hereabouts has made a com- 
modity of it. What is saved is usually fed on 
the farms. Sometimes it figures in trades be- 
tween neighbors, but never in the open market. 



298 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

It's worth as much as the straw, at least — five 
or six dollars a ton. 

We shan't sell our crops in the raw; but if 
we were to sell we'd realize about $2,000. 

In 1908, the year we bought the farm, the 
tenant's crop summed up sixty bushels of 
wheat, thirty bushels of oats, one hundred 
and twenty bushels of corn, a few small 
loads of fodder, and no hay. If he had 
owned the entire crop and had sold on the 
average prices of December 1, his gross income 
would have been about $165, with nothing 
counted out for labor. And his crop was about 
on a footing with the crops grown on other 
farms here that were run as ours was. 

So, considering everything, we feel that our 
farming has paid and that we have succeeded 
uncommonly well. If future years showed 
no improvement over this year in point of 
yields, if we made no further advance in any 
way, and if there were no income from any 
other source, we could live in security on our 
farm. We could indulge no extravagances, 
but we could get along very comfortably. 
We'd be well above the poverty level. If we 
knew distress it wouldn't be the distress of 
hunger or privation. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 299 

We couldn't be satisfied with that, though. 
We should feel a very positive distress at this 
point in achievement if we thought we must 
go no further — not because we need or want 
more than the farm is now giving us, but be- 
cause we have just now discovered that real 
achievement is all ahead of us. 

We have set no records in anything we have 
done. There's the rub. But why shouldn't 
we? We're carrying no handicap; there's no 
obstacle in our way ; and there's no reason why 
we must think of stopping where we are, even 
though we have done better in many ways than 
we hoped in the beginning. Frankly, this was 
an adventure. We meant to succeed in it. 
Never at any time have Laura and I seriously 
discussed the possibility of failure. I shouldn't 
wonder if that's the main reason why we 
haven't failed. Tenacity of temper, with the 
mind set upon success, and with no alternative 
of defeat to be considered — that's a good half 
of accomplishment itself. 

We didn't go at our work with any fixed 
goal, saying to ourselves that when we got to 
such and such a point we'd be willing to halt 
and thereafter let well enough alone. Always 
our talk has been of something ahead, some- 



300 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

thing better than the best of the past. We're 
still of that mind. We mean to keep right on, 
using the past simply as a beginning, and re- 
garding the future as an invitation which must 
be accepted. 

You know how pleasing it is to review a 
creditable performance and say to yourself 
over it: *'Well, there! I've never done that 
before! I'm advancing!" I'm trying to think 
how it would feel to change the form and say: 
"Well, there! Nobody on earth ever did that 
before !" Before we're through with our work 
we want to taste that satisfaction. 

For my part, I don't much care what form 
this achievement may take, if only it's some- 
thing worth doing. Maybe we'll wind up by 
growing more corn on an acre of land than has 
been grown before. That wouldn't be bad. 
Maybe we'll work out a means of reducing the 
production cost of one or another of the farm 
staples. That would be all right with me. 
Maybe we'll succeed in demonstrating in some 
new way how far an acre of land may go in 
furnishing food for us humans. That would be 
bully! Maybe we'll discover a new wrinkle in 
the work of restoring vitality to an exhausted 
soil. That would be going some! Or maybe 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 301 

our pace-making will be decidedly more modest 
in its character. I shan't kick about that. 
Whatever it may be, we're bent upon doing 
something here at Happy Hollow that will 
advance the business of farming and so make 
it easier for folks to live. 

Is that a practical aim for a farmer? Or is 
it merely a sentimental notion? I don't care 
what you call it. We're going to do it. Only 
when that is done shall we be able to feel that 
our adventure has wholly and happily justified 
itself. 

Why shouldn't we do it? Goodness knows 
there are plenty of ways open for breaking 
farm records. We're progressing, and we're 
moving fast in our understanding of possibili- 
ties; but we haven't yet moved very far from 
the old-time stagnation. Everything that's 
being done on the farms of to-day will be bet- 
ter done in the next generation. Our feet 
aren't yet accustomed to the new forward stride 
after so many centuries of just marking time. 
Every blessed thing in the new science of farm- 
ing has been discovered and developed since I 
was a boy. We're mighty vain of all this 
brand-new advancement; but don't you think 
it likely that the farmers of the next generation 



302 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

may look back over our work and smile at the 
half way things we've done and the half way 
goals we've been striving for? It may do us 
good to brood over that a bit. 

I think I should feel a little mean in settling 
back and resting content with what we've done, 
even though it suffices for our needs, when I 
know that we haven't yet rendered any real 
service to anybody but ourselves. So long as 
that chance of service lies plain before us we 
shall keep right ahead. Perhaps the vision 
has some sentiment in it, but the realization will 
be practical enough. 



XV 

I've found out about that mocking bird. 
He's quit his singing; I haven't heard a peep 
out of him for a week. He's too busy. Late 
yesterday afternoon, when the first hint of the 
evening coolness of the mountains was in the 
air, Laura and I sat in the shade of the grape- 
vine that hides the nest. We were talking a 
little, by fits and starts, and watching Peggy 
and Betty as they played at "tea party" on 
the grass before their tiny house. 

Then there came a sudden flash of warm 
brown and warm gray in the slanting sunlight, 
and there was the songster of last week balanc- 
ing airily on a stem of the vine just over our 
heads, flicking his tail with sharp, excited jerks, 
twisting sideways to take a keen look at us. 
He must have figured us out as harmless, for 
he went hopping along the stem to disappear 
in the thick leafage. We saw why he hadn't 
been singing lately: He held a small brown 
grasshopper in his bill! In a moment there 
came from the deeply sheltered nest a sound 

303 



804 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

as unmistakable as the contented sighing of a 
babe at the breast. Daddy was stuffing his 
grasshopper down a yawning, hungry pink 
throat. In another flash he was gone to find 
another tidbit. He's keeping at it steadily, 
from morning till night. He is certainly a 
busy bird! 

"Well!" I said. "The old man has had a 
come-down, hasn't he?" 

"Has he?" Laura asked quietly. Her eyes 
were on our own babies at our feet. The sim- 
ple question caught me up short. 

"No, no!" I said. "God knows I didn't 
mean that. He's been promoted ; he's gone up 
to the very head of his class — as far up as any 
male thing may ever hope to get in this life." 

We didn't argue the matter. There was no 
need. We only sat and looked about us and 
let the calm of the coming dusk take posses- 
sion of us. 

It was an exquisite picture we saw. Near 
lay our cornfields, a very embodiment of 
Plenty brought magically into being. A light 
air swept across the tasseled ranks of the corn, 
and they bent, rustling, whispering of the pro- 
found mystery. It needed no abnormal fancy 
to catch a hint of what they talked about. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 805 

We'll never learn the strange, wild-sweet vo- 
cabulary, maybe ; but if we will we may under- 
stand the spirit of it. Life's abounding good- 
ness — that's what it all means. And beyond 
our own lay other fields of corn, stretching 
away and away into the distances, covering the 
land with life's eternal assurance. Among the 
corn, embroidery of gold on the rich, deep 
green, were fields of wheat stubble after har- 
vest, dotted with stacked mounds of their grain 
ready for the hands of the threshers. Here and 
there, nestled in trees, stood the homes of the 
farmers, gray-walled, gray-roofed, with the 
smoke of the supper fires curling and drifting 
from the chimney tops and melting into the 
evening haze. Slowly, slowly, while we 
watched, the hill-rimmed cup of the valley 
filled with purple shadows, a flood of wondrous 
color, rising, swelling, brimming over. Listen- 
ing, we could hear the far, faint sounds of the 
life of the farms — the rattle of a wagon home- 
ward bound over a country lane, the friendly- 
sounding bark of a house-dog, the shrill whinny 
of a hungry colt for its dam. So homely it 
was, and so beautiful I It gave me a little pang 
of wistfulness. 

**I wish I were a poet," I said. "I'd like to 



306 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

sing of all this glory." But in the next minute 
I had to laugh. "No," I told myself, "it's bet- 
ter just to live in it than to sing of it. There's 
that mocker. He quit his singing to feed his 
babies. I'll bet he's a far happier chap than 
he was last week. This is the better part!" 

The full tide of the dusk was upon us. Lit- 
tle Betty left her play and came to my knee, 
coaxing to be taken in for her night's drink of 
new milk. Dorothy called, to us from the 
house, summoning us to the late summertime 
supper. So we went into the cheerful dining- 
room and sat down together. 

We had a couple of guests at the table — not 
"company" folks, but good friends who have 
learned to be at home here. There was some 
gay talk over the meal; not frivolous nor 
smart; serious enough at moments, but light- 
hearted for all that, carefree, with a laugh al- 
ways ready to follow close upon the heels of 
the spoken word. We were feeling pretty 
good. 

After supper, when the youngsters were in 
bed, somebody hinted at a rubber of whist; 
but somehow we drifted out to the lawn, with 
rugs spread upon the grass in the soft twi- 
light, and there we went on with our talk. 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 307 

The talk turned by and by to another sum- 
mer night out of doors — our first night on the 
farm, six years ago, when we camped in the 
thicket down by the big spring, strangers fac- 
ing a new hfe with only a vision to guide us. 
That time seemed very remote now, separated 
from this day by a world of curious experience 
— no, not curious, but vivid, vital, transform- 
ing. It needed no deep self-scrutiny to dis- 
cover that I'd become another man in those six 
years. The change was more than a change 
in interests or in manner of living or in out- 
look; it was a change that went to the very 
heart's core. Is it egotism to say that I've be- 
come a wise man ? All right ; but don't grudge 
me that indulgence. Say if you like that there 
are degrees and degrees of wisdom. What I 
mean is that upon the whole I'm more wise 
than foolish. I'm rid now of just about all 
of the insanities that may fill a man's life with 
doubts and distresses. 

Farming has made the change ; nothing else. 
You know how easily a man's thinking may be- 
come all littered up with the non-essentials if 
the life about him is tangled and confused. 
He mistakes the shadows for realities and the 
realities for shadows till after a while the whole 



808 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

scheme of things seems no better than a vain 
illusion. There's only one cure for that: To 
find the way back to simplicity. 

Ours is simple living, and it has led me into 
plain, straight ways of thinking. Can you be- 
lieve me when I say that I have no doubts now 
about life? It's entirely true. Why should I 
have, when Life itself has been patiently teach- 
ing me? 

We talked of these things the other night out 
of doors ; talked on and on while the constella- 
tions marched orderly, stately, unhalting across 
the infinite background of the sky. We were 
in a fine temper for trying to put ourselves 
right, with the mood of the great outdoors to 
help. We slept peacefully that night. 

Laura hasn't read a great deal of this story 
as it's been a-writing — a scrap now and then, 
pronouncing a mild sort of approval. I 
haven't minded that, for I know what the trou- 
ble must })e. Though I've let you see some of 
the surface signs of the delight we've known, 
I've failed to say so many things I ought to 
have said, so many things I'd like to have said, 
so many things I would have said but for the 
luckless circumstance that I can't find the 
right words for them. It's of no use to search 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 309 

the lexicons or the books of synonyms; the 
words I want aren't there. I've been searching 
everywhere for them, but they elude me. I'm 
beginning to wonder if anybody has yet found 
them, or if they aren't still to be molded out of 
the flux of life. There must be words still un- 
born, better than any we know. You'll think 
so if you ever try to tell a plain true story like 
this. If I were only romancing there would 
be plenty of words crowding up for attention ; 
but for use in a bit of truth-telhng there are 
so few! 

Where's the word for supreme content, for 
unfaltering faith in the Divine order of things ? 
There isn't any; but there will be some time. 
The wordsmiths won't be the fellows who'll 
make it. It will leap warm and living out of 
the heart of somebody all unlearned in every- 
thing but content and faith. When the right 
time comes, suddenly he'll look up from his 
work and speak the great word simply. 

I wish I had it now, for that's the word I'd 
like to use in telling of the spirit that hovers 
over Happy Hollow. It's a passion too deep 
to be sounded, a calm too perfect to be ruffled, 
both rolled into one. We would have that feel- 
ing astir in us though we had failed as farm- 



310 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

ers, though we had done no better at crop- 
growing than the poor tenant before us. The 
abundance of the fields is good, and we're very- 
thankful that it has come to us; but if it had 
been withheld we shouldn't be bankrupt in con- 
tent if only life were given us here in the hills. 
It's a feeling that seems to belong to this per- 
fect setting, regardless of all the minor cir- 
cumstances. Just to look out into the soft 
glory of a misty morning; just to see life astir 
at the height of a fervid summer noontime; 
just to draw close about the kindly hearth-fire 
on a blustery winter evening; just to feel the 
good earth under us and the deep sky over us 
and the sheltering hills round about us — that's 
enough. 

Though we've fared so much better than she 
in the circumstances of life, Jake's poor old 
mother knows as well as we do what this feel- 
ing is. Yes, she knows it better, for it hasn't 
been tangled up in her heart with so many- 
other feelings. 

Early one Sunday mormng we went up the 
mountainside to make her a little visit. Her 
cabin was very bare. On the table was a bit of 
the cold cornbread she had made her breakfast 
upon, and on the back of a rusted sheetiron 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 311 

stove no bigger than a toy stood her blackened 
coffee pot. She had a rough homemade table 
in one corner; her chair was a cracker-box on 
end, and squeezed in beside the table was a nar- 
row bed with drawn ropes for springs. We 
were welcome, though we had to stand up for 
our call because there was nothing to sit upon. 
"Ain't it sure a powerful pretty mornin'?" 
she said. "IVe been watchin' it sence sun-up, 
through the trees. Sunday, ain't it? I knowed 
it was. A body ought to go to meetin' Sun- 
days. I used to go; but it seems like when a 
woman gits as old as me she don't always have 
clothes. I ain't got none but this dress I got 
on. But if I don't go to meetin' I kin stay 
home an' be thankful. Ain't a person got a 
lot to be thankful fer? I got my health, an' I 
got my home. The' ain't no reason fer any- 
body bein' good to an old woman like me ; but 
they are. A lady in town done give me that 
stove yest'd'y, an' I packed it over the moun- 
tain. It's been terrible unhandy, cookin' my 
victuals on a chip fire outdoors. Sence Jake 
died it's kind o' hard fer me to git work some- 
times; but I'm piecin' a quilt that I'll git a 
dollar fer when it's done. It's sort o' slow, 
'count of my fingers bein' so old an' stiff; but 



312 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

a body oughtn't to complain none about that. 
A dollar will keep me in meal an' coffee a long 
time, won't it? I ain't got anybody but the 
Lord to take keer of me; but He's doin' it, 
ain't he? I sure am thankful." 

What has that spirit to do with large success ? 
Isn't it in itself the largest of all successes? 
I'll leave it to you. 

When the harvest is finished next fall and 
the farm is put in shipshape for the winter, 
Laura and I with our children are going over 
to Egypt and then up through some of the 
countries to the north, Italy and France and 
Germany and England and a few other places. 
That's to be a part of our children's education. 
We want them to see some pictures and hear 
some music and get something of the "feel" of 
the great world and its great history. We 
think they'll be the better for that, and maybe 
usefuller when they come to take their places. 

We shan't spend much time in the feverish 
capitals — just time enough to give us some 
sharp effects of contrast. We're going for the 
most part along quiet ways so we may see real 
life instead of the poor counterfeits. 

I suppose the folks will spend most of their 
time in the towns and villages, in the libraries 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 313 

and galleries and cathedrals and in the town 
homes. I shall spend my time mostly with 
the farmers, living in their houses, working 
with them at their jobs, getting as close as I'm 
able to the minds and hearts of the living men 
and women on the soil. I've had just about 
town enough in mine. 

We're not to pay for this trip out of the 
hoarded profits of our farming at Happy Hol- 
low. If we tried that, we'd get stuck some- 
where between here and New York. I've 
turned back to my magazine writing to help 
me through with some emergency money. At 
that, they won't see me staking high heaps of 
gold at Monte Carlo. We're going quietly, 
modestly, keeping prudent watch over the pen- 
nies. There will be nothing of the tip-giving, 
racing, breathless, bored-to-death American 
tourist about us. We shall move leisurely, 
stopping where we want to stop, with money 
enough for shelter and food. Ours won't be a 
glittering "progress," and we shan't bring 
back marbles or canvases or costly trophies. 
We shall travel as befits such a family as ours, 
eager to get the utmost of enduring good out 
of the opportunity of a lifetime. 

I'm telling you this, not for the fact alone, 



314 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

but because the prospect has shown in a curious 
way what the life of Happy Hollow has done 
to me. Save on the family's account, I'm not 
half so keen for the trip as I fancied I should 
be. Honestly, I don't more than half want to 
go for my own pleasure. I'd just about as 
soon stay at home here in the Arkansas hills. 

That wasn't my temper six years ago. If 
we had planned then for such an adventure I'd 
have spent excited days and sleepless nights 
on the planning. That's not the case now. I'm 
brushing up my German and Spanish a bit, 
and I'm trying to direct the children as I'm 
able in some reading they ought to do before 
we go; but my own days' work goes on right 
placidly, free of nervous exaltation. Not that 
I'm indifferent. I know it will be a wonderful 
experience and that I'll come home with sym- 
pathies broadened and understanding mightily 
quickened. I'm always anxious for new hu- 
man contacts, and I'll get some on this trip. 
But with all that in prospect I'm not so keen 
for it as I should have been before we came to 
the farm. 

I know what you're thinking: "Why, that 
man's getting old! He must be losing his 
grip." But that's not the explanation. Maybe 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 315 

if I tell you a little story it will help you to 
understand. 

This Fayetteville country was settled years 
and years before the railroad was built — and 
that's nearly forty years ago. A new railroad 
has come in lately. Last summer I rode back 
into the hills a dozen miles east of home, and 
there I stopped at a farmhouse one day. The 
farmer was a middle-aged man, and his father 
who lived with him was "goin' on eighty." At 
dinner our talk ran for a time on the new rail- 
way and the advantages it would give us farm- 
ers in the way of better markets for our stuff 
and better shipping rates. It was the younger 
man who did most of the talking. By and by 
the old father broke in. 

"Hit's kind o' cur'us," he said, "but I ain't 
ever seen thet first railroad yit. Hit's done 
been thar a long while, too. I've sort o' fig- 
gered sometimes thet I'd go in an' hev a look 
at that darned thing, just for cur'osity; but I 
ain't never got round to it, an' I don't expect 
as how I ever will. What'd be the use? Hit 
don't take a railroad to make me happy. If 
I've ever got any time to spend in lookin', I 
can set right here on the front porch an' look 
across the cove at the hills. They're a heap 



816 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

better to look at than a common railroad. I 
don't b'lieve a railroad would content me to 
look at like these hills does." 

Well, there you are! Say if you like that 
the old man was hopelessly primitive and be- 
hind the times; but he's so far ahead of the 
times in the supreme good of life that not 
many of us will ever catch up with him. 

IVe learned to feel pretty much as he does 
toward the glories of these hills. They've 
given me what I needed. I've looked at them 
for so long now, whenever there's a brief 
chance to look away from my work, that I 
know every round line and every gentle curve 
and every play of light and shadow as I know 
the soft curve of my baby's cheek and the light 
in her eyes. I'm going to be sorry when the 
time comes to turn my back upon them and go 
away to look at other hills. 

We'll see some great old hills, of course; 
hills sheltering happy valleys, hills that have 
been blood-soaked and tormented through cen- 
turies of bitter struggle, hills in whose shadows 
great races of men have worked and fought 
and suffered out their destinies; but we'll see 
no hills so good as these at home. 

Home I Isn't that the very word I was fuss- 



HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 317 

ing about a little while ago — the word that 
hadn't been found — the word that would stand 
for faith and content and goodness ? Why, of 
course that's it ! And we've had it all the time 1 
Home! 

What is the idea of home, anyway? You 
needn't bother to turn to the dictionaries. I've 
just this minute looked through half a dozen 
of them ; and what do you suppose I've found ? 
Listen: "The house in which one resides; 
place or country in which one dwells ; pertain- 
ing to one's dwelling; the abode of the family 
to which one belongs ; a place or state of rest or 
comfort; a future state; the grave." Now 
what do you think of that? 

Yet that's not surprising, when you think of 
it. We have the one great word ; how dare we 
hope to find other words fit to define it with? 
It can't be done. There isn't any definition. 

But, oh, I wish you could see the picture I'm 
looking at just now! Then you'd understand. 

It's evening. There are long shadows across 
the land. The day has been warm, but the air 
is coming cool now from the heights. Work is 
over. From my window I can see Sam going 
wearily through the yard toward his cottage 
with his two little boys. My own family is 



318 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 

gathering in for supper time. Laura has been 
working with her honeysuckles and roses this 
afternoon, and she's tired, sitting by the big 
open south window and waiting for Dorothy to 
call. On the floor in the middle of the living- 
room the two littler children are sprawled at 
their length with a book. Peggy is telling 
stories, and Betty's voice is chirping along be- 
hind, trying to pronounce some of the easy 
words. Peggy is laughing at her queer, quaint 
accents; and the baby laughs, too, without 
knowing what it's about. To laugh seems to 
strike her as the only thing to do. My son has 
just come by my desk, laying his hand upon my 
shoulder with a jolly word. Twilight is soft- 
ening the lines of the wide rooms. We'll light 
the lamps pretty soon, and the wide spaces 
under the spreading roof will shine out golden. 
There's no evil under this roof, no bitterness, 
no sorrow, but only a divine content. This is 
Home! 



THE END. 



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